


We run a very tight ship

by Fericita, middlemarch, sagiow



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cruise Ship, And then they were quarantined, Angst, Bachelorette Party, COVID-19, Campy, Crew as Family, Doctors & Physicians, F/M, Family, Gen, Grunge, Hot Tub, Humor, I hope, Karaoke, Male Friendship, Pop Culture, Quarantine, Recovery, References to Music, Slow Burn, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, Women Being Awesome, bespoke cocktails, but not just campy, cocktails, lounge singer, magician, pandemic fic, reference to poetry, reference to theologians, we will go down with this ship!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 35,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23417365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fericita/pseuds/Fericita, https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagiow/pseuds/sagiow
Summary: "There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.Every single passenger on the ship would have that thought. At least once. Sometimes, on an endless loop, like the announcement about pina coladas on Deck 4. It turned out, the only way out was through. With card tricks.
Relationships: Byron Hale/Anne Hastings, Emma Green/Henry Hopkins, Jedediah "Jed" Foster/Mary Phinney
Comments: 170
Kudos: 14
Collections: Lock Down Fest





	1. Salty Dog

“Home sweet horrible,” Jed muttered under his breath, sort of, because Sam, the tall and impressively fit first mate for the cruise ship gave him a sympathetic look. The passage-way was narrow but the space he’d been assigned was almost preposterously small.

“The med bay is bigger,” he said. 

“You mean you can turn around in it?” Jed snarked, running a hand through his hair. Sam shrugged and Jed thought maybe he didn’t want to make an enemy of someone who might be an ally, if not a friend. “I don’t mean to complain-- I didn’t have a real spatial context for a cabin on a cruise ship.”

“I got you the porthole. Captain Summers didn’t think it was a big deal, but I thought the ship’s doctor could at least get an ocean view. Balcony was a bridge too far. Sorry, man,” Sam said.

“No need for apologies—not from you anyway. I appreciate you going to bat for me and I’m sure this’ll be fine,” Jed replied, willing his face to look as sincere as his voice was. The beard he’d grown and kept didn’t help with sincerity but he was attached to it now, partly because his mother insisted it was uncouth. Jed had had it up to here with couth.

“You packed properly,” Sam commented, gesturing at Jed’s solitary duffel, which was like an oversized olive canvas sausage. It held a fully loaded e-reader, the stethoscope that had gotten him through the internship from hell, and all the clothes he’d have for the next year, the duration of his contract as the medic for Alexandria Line’s _Empress Queen_ , a stupid cruise ship name that might as well be Mansion House for all the sense it made. He’d have to get whoever it was who dealt with laundry to press his tux, which he thought was overkill but his mother and sister-in-law Jessica had insisted was appropriate. He’d drawn the line at white tie (though he had tucked in a set of cuff-links shaped like compasses, so sue him.)

“I didn’t expect a walk-in closet,” Jed said, getting a laugh from Sam.

“Thank the Lord in Heaven,” Sam said with real religious feeling.

“That bad?”

“It varies. We’ve got a handful this time who, well, I expect fireworks,” Sam said. 

“You mean tantrums?” Jed pushed. He always pushed. It worked, about 60/40, so there was no reason to stop. 

“We’ll do our best to make sure all our passengers have a regal stay,” Sam said carefully, sounding just like the idiotic commercial. It seemed beneath him.

“When that gets old, you know where to find me,” Jed offered. 

“Loud and clear. Loud and clear,” Sam said, smiling broadly. Jesus, he was a handsome man; Jed was comfortable enough to say that, at least in his internal monologue. Sam walked away, his gait easy and loose, elegant really. Jed was fairly sure Jessica would say Sam wore his uniform well. Very well _indeed_. And then she’d waggle her overly plucked blonde eyebrows and Ez would roll his eyes.

“Better unpack,” Jed said to himself, but aloud. Whatever. There was no one to remark that he was talking to himself. Certainly nowhere for someone to hide in the cabin, where he’d be living for the next twelve months minimum because that’s where his fucking “life’s journey” had led him. If Eliza hadn’t taken him to the cleaner’s in the divorce, getting the house and the condo in Aspen and somehow also his fucking sailboat that she’d hated, if he hadn’t spent the last six months in rehab, he might not have found his only viable job opportunity was on this cruise ship with its washed-up lounge singer Byron V. Hale and magician-illusionist (there was a magician-illusionist? That was a thing?) named PJ Squivers on the fore-deck at 4. 

“Fuck this,” Jed said, not sure what he was consigning to fuck-dom. Eliza and her greed? Byron Hale covering Barry Manilow? Every hospital in the tri-state area turning him down despite Harvard and his PhD from Stanford? The tiny cabin with its single bed he could never bring a woman back to? His own self-pity? If he figured it out, would he get a gold star?

It was the _Empress Queen_. He’d get a gold star _and_ a fucking tiara. Good thing he could carry off a tiara.


	2. Three Wise (Wo)Men

“This is gonna be ah-MAAAAAA-zing!”

Mary lifted her eyes from unpacking her carry-on to watch Charlotte buzzing manically around the room, opening every cabinet door and drawer to scout out the contents. “I was so right to get you to do this. We’re gonna have an absolute blast, I’m telling you."

"I hope you’re right,” Mary granted.

“Oh, you know I’m right, babe. You never go wrong by taking the scenic route. One week of leisure, of sun, of which the hardest decisions will be deciding whether to have a margarita or mojito by the pool, whether to see the sights or hit the beach, or whether to dress fancy or slutty for the evening.” She took stock of the minibar’s content, price list, gasped, and closed it immediately. “Oh, and me figuring out where to crash when you take a hot man back to the room. We’re gonna need some serious synchro.”

Mary scoffed, shaking out a wrinkled pair of shorts. “That’s not gonna happen.”

“Oh, it’s _definitely_ gonna happen. Better make it an Afternoon Delight. But in case we can’t, and magic strikes at midnight, what should our code be? A sticker on the door, like in college? Two, if we get extra lucky?”

“Not. Gonna. Happen.” Mary slammed the luggage shut for emphasis. “And if I’d known that was _your_ game plan, Char, I would’ve booked my own room.”

“What, a lousy interior coffin, with what’s left of your lousy research post-doc stipend? And miss out on this wonderful view?” Charlotte threw open the door to the balcony, the sea air and scream of seagulls immediately drafting in. “And gazing at more constellations than your beautiful Bambi eyes have ever seen? And enjoying way-too-early morning coffee and terribly nerdy reading while the sun rises and baby dolphins greet you like the secret Disney Princess you’ve always been? Welcome, Princess Mary!” she squeaked, even throwing in a passable cetaceous chirp to cap it off.

Mary crossed her arms, her book tight against her chest. “It’s Baroness, not Princess, _Flipper._ And David Suzuki’s not nerdy.”

“ _Everything_ you do is nerdy, Dr. Phinney. Or serious. Or sad,” Charlotte groaned, dropping heavily on her bed. “Where’s the Party Mary of the Dubya Era? The one that dyed her hair a crazy color every three weeks and had Evil Exes battling over her?”

Mary cringed. “That sounds like a different me.”

“Well, channel her back, just this week.”

Charlotte grabbed her hand, pulling her down to sit next to her, and wrapped her arm around her; Mary didn’t fight it. “Girl, I know it’s been rough this last year and more, with Gus gone.... you’ve buried yourself in your research, barely stepping out of that dark bunker of a lab of yours, living vicariously in Petri dishes and Excel plots. But now, you’re done, you’re _finally_ done! You’ve graduated med school too many fucking times already, and now you’re gonna be the most gloriously nerdy Pestilence Princess- uh fine, Baroness, even though it completely ruins my alliteration and makes you sound like a drug lord… lady… whatever.”

Mary chuckled silently and rested her head on her friend’s shoulder. “And before starting your famously successful career in yet-another bunker of a lab at the CDC,” Charlotte continued, “I’m so thrilled you agreed to come out and play with the Red Cross these next few months. Imagine getting some actual hands-on experience on your résumé and a non-ghostly, transparent shade of white on your already-too-white face! And before all that, imagine getting to be on a five-star cruise in the Caribbean, with your _ten-_ fucking-star best friend, surrounded by pretty people who just wanna have a good time, with good food, good drinks and especially, good company. So please, before we spend months in tents in the jungle as uber-dedicated, selfless, abstinent professionals who save a bunch of lives, let’s live ours a little.”

From the comfort of her friend’s embrace, Mary pondered this, and pursed her lips. “I thought you told me you actually have a pretty nice apartment in Port-au-Prince ...and I don’t remember a chastity clause in the contract.”

“Good, you’re readjusting your priorities. And you’re right, I would’ve never lasted otherwise. Haitians sure are something, I tell you...”

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door, and Charlotte bolted. “Ooh this must be Anne!”

Mary did not have time to ask any of her many questions before the door was opened and squeals of laughter resonated from the hall. Soon, Charlotte reappeared, dragging along a red-headed woman, impeccably dressed and coiffed, and visibly very much aware of it. “Mary, this is Anne Hastings, R.N. Extraordinaire. We met in the Crimea after Putin’s Annexation and we’ve worked in International Aid ever since. Anne, may I present my old Yale cellmate Mary Phinney, M.D. Supreme?”

“... you never told me you were in the Crimea?!” Mary exclaimed.

“... you never told me you went to Yale!” Anne mirrored, in a British accent Mary had not expected. “How ghastly.”

“I know, both of you, _what_ was I thinking... careless Millennials, with their compulsive globe-trotting and avocado-everything despite soul-sucking student loans, amirite?” She held up both fists, but got no pumps in return. “See, you girls are getting along splendidly already. I just know we’re gonna be best buds, like the _Mamma Mia’s_ of Haiti. _Empress Queen, feel the beat of the tambourine…!”_

“ _Oh yeah!”_ Anne sang along with gusto. “Well, in that case, I’m obviously Tanya. So, dear Dynamos, shall we get ta’ted up and proceed to having the time of our life?”

Mary stared in silence, confused. “Tatted? I don’t know how I feel about tattoo artists on cruise ships…”

“ _Tarrrrted_ , you sweet vanilla one,” Charlotte laughed. “So slutty it is. Matching ink totally _not_ off the table, but for now, time for you to get some dot-dot-dot, Donna.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Easter eggs galore, grab a basket and hunt 'em!


	3. Bacon Me Angry

“I don’t see what the problem is, young man,” the older woman announced. It wasn’t so much that she sounded imperious as that she hit each word like she was striking a brass gong with a mallet. She looked like the kind of person who might have a gong and accompanying mallet sitting on an antique mahogany sideboard, though she was dressed far less flashily than many of the women on the cruise, who seemed to think chartreuse and fuchsia were flattering to any complexion in any combination. She wore what might have been the day costume in Caribbean line designed by Eileen Fisher, a long, sleeveless cardigan in a somehow shimmering navy knit flapping behind her like cape Padme Amidala had put in her discard pile; the rest of the outfit was a greyish-oatmeal linen mélange that matched her hair. It was the diamonds that gave her away, big enough to be real and definitely set in platinum. Jed had internalized the assessment after an infinity of country club cocktail parties. Sam, perfectly neat and eminently presentable as ever, was going to have to make sure there wasn’t a problem. Jed was curious how he was going to manage it.

The woman was cradling a pig in her arms.

“Ms. Brannan,” Sam began, all his polite conciliation foiled in a second by her brusque interruption.

“ _Mrs._ Bridget Brannan, none of this new-fangled Ms. business! I was properly married and I earned that title. Every. Single. Day,” she said, the last three words clearly sentences of their own, as if she were 19 and on Insta. Or whatever 19 year olds were using now, Jed didn’t pretend to be au courant about social media. That would be embarrassing.

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Brannan,” Sam tried again. “It’s just that the _Empress Queen_ doesn’t allow…livestock on board. There are public health issues. I’m sure our ship’s doctor, Dr. Foster, would be happy to explain,” he said, gesturing at Jed who shook his head and tried to take a step back. Unfortunately, he was already at the deck’s rail. An extremely attractive brunette in a blue sundress caught his eye and raised an elegant eyebrow. He shrugged and thought again how it wasn’t just the cramped size of his cabin that prevented him from any romantic assignations—anyone on the ship could be his patient and no matter how lax things were supposed to be in international waters, he didn’t want to know he’d slept with a patient. There were lines he wouldn’t cross and also, the medical board was going to be scrutinizing his behavior for the rest of time. 

“I assume you mean Silas?” Mrs. Brannan said, still sounding like she was using a bullhorn. 

“Silas?”

“He is my emotional support pot-bellied pig and I cannot do without him!” Jed faked a coughing fit to cover his laughter. The brunette didn’t have to conceal her smile and didn’t—God, she was gorgeous and also clearly had a decent sense of humor. Sam was made of sterner stuff than either of them and still appeared nothing more than courteous.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he said.

“Silas is helping me navigate my grief over losing my dear Declan,” Mrs. Brannan explained, shifting the pig in her arms which made her cardigan-cape billow and the diamonds catch the light. She knew what the hell she was up to.

“Declan was a relative?”

“My pool-boy, he was like a son to me, so strapping and helpful, always ready to assist however he could—I swear he would have robbed a bank for me if I’d asked,” Mrs. Brannan said. Blue Sundress winked, totally hot, totally appealing, and Jed gritted his teeth. He thought he’d imagined every miserable scenario for the next twelve months but he’d forgotten You Can’t Make A Pass At The Gorgeous Woman Because You Might Be Her Doctor And Also You’re A Fucking Pathetic Failure. More to write in his diary since that was all that was left to him. _Dear Diary, today I saw a drop-dead beautiful woman in a blue sundress and I focused on a pot-bellied pig…_

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sam said.

“Thank you, dear. Declan is in a better place, I know, but it’s hard. Terribly hard and Silas just has a way of helping me cope with the loss,” Mrs. Brannan said. The pig made a snuffling sound that didn’t seem especially comforting.

“May he rest in peace,” Sam offered solemnly.

“Good luck, he’s in Malibu with that bitch Julia Grant,” she snapped.

“Oh. My. I see,” Sam said. Blue Sundress was now pink-cheeked, her eyes very bright, trying as hard as she could not to laugh her ass off. It was likely, almost guaranteed, that that ass, one Jed couldn’t actually see, was equally hot. He was starting to envy the pig, just because it probably got fed truffles and didn’t have to deal with being sexually frustrated, undercompensated, and really, really wanting a hit which it felt disgusted by. He found himself wishing someone needed some stitches. 

“You do see, don’t you, why I must keep Silas with me. I made arrangements, I paid for a Grand Royale Sovereign Suite, so Silas could have his own space. He’s particular,” Mrs. Brannan said. “Captain Summers knows all about it. He said it wouldn’t be a problem. In. The. Least.”

“Then I’m sure we can work something out that meets everyone’s needs,” Sam said, smooth as silk or a very high quality single malt, Oban or Aberlour. Jed had never struggled with alcohol, could remember it almost fondly, unlike coke and Percs. At least he’d never have to tell Blue Sundress any of it. It was a skimpy silver lining. It was all he had, unlike fucking Silas the pig.

“Can you believe this, chéri?” the voice came from beside him, a woman’s voice, familiar as coffee.

“Shit-- Lisette?” 

“I wondered how long it would take for you to notice I was here, Jedediah,” Lisette said, doing that thing she did with the J at the beginning of his name, that thing that was so utterly French. The years hadn’t touched her at all and the crimson sarong and sandals she’d chosen suited her as well as her black turtlenecks and capris. It had been a long time since Paris, maybe not long enough. “I’m on assignment.”

“Doing what?” She’d been working for a fashion designer and painting when they’d been together before. It was hard to see how that translated to a tacky cruise ship.

“Photojournalism. Condé Nast is…appreciative of my eye,” Lisette said. “I’m appreciative of the paycheck. My apartment and studio space, you can imagine.”

“I thought you had help with that,” Jed retorted. It wasn’t so much that she’d left him as that she’d found a better prospect; Antoine had a gallery and family connections, a viscount somewhere, a chateau in Provence… She’d explained it matter-of-factly, as if Jed couldn’t possibly be offended.

“Yves? That was over months ago,” she said.

“I’m out of date then. It was Antoine I remember,” he said.

“Oh, Antoine! What a time that was, the champagne, the nights, so many stars…” she mused.

“Yeah. And now look where we are,” he said, inclining his head towards Mrs. Brannan, who’d lowered her voice just enough she was no longer doubling as a fire alarm. Someone had handed Blue Sundress a tropical drink and she was sipping it like a goddess.

“Here we are, you and I,” Lisette said softly.

“And a pot-bellied pig. Don’t forget Silas,” Jed said. Lisette shoved him lightly, in a way he knew meant nothing to her, but he caught Sundress’s eye and saw she’d noticed. So, had Sam and if he wasn’t mistaken, Mrs. Brannan hadn’t missed a trick. Shit. Or in honor of Lisette, _merde_.


	4. Pils Al Passtor

“Welcome aboard, Miss Green. Ready to set sail for the grandest of voyages?”

Emma smiled tightly, forcing her eyes to follow her lips, and knowing they failed. Instead, she averted them, hiding their escape behind a wholly unnecessary adjustment of her glasses. She stood between the First Mate and the chaplain in the _haie d’honneur_ greeting her family aboard the most luxurious ship of their fleet, in the most breathtaking of atriums, by the grandest of staircases - so the heavy-handed brochure said. Captain Summers bowed low to the young lady before him, and lower to her mother beside her.

“Captain Summers,” she offered her hand daintily, never more the lady then among her grossly underpaid staff. “I trust everything has been arranged as instructed?”

“To the letter, Mrs. Green. Your guests have been given all the best cabins, the most prestigious reserved, of course, for the bridal party. I must say, your daughter has truly outdone herself with the decoration and planning. Alexandria Line’s future is bright indeed,” he enthused, to Emma’s inner cringing. _Dial it down, dude._

“Well she better has!” snapped the bride-to-be. “My wedding is _the_ event of the year in this town and probably all of Virginia: it has to be _absolutely_ perfect in every way. A question of Green family pride, which I’m sure she has very close to heart,” she added sweetly, as a cat offering a cleanly killed prey to its owner, and Emma braced for her to start eating the head. “After all, it’s probably the only Green wedding she’ll ever have the chance of organizing.” _Crunch, there it is_.

Ignoring her gift, Emma distributed programs to the guests, the embossed letters popping elegantly from the cotton cardstock. “We will let y’all settle in and hope you join the Captain tonight at eight for a welcome dinner,” she explained, her voice pleasant and professional, just greeting regular guests onboard as she did twice a month, every month of the year, year after year since her very first summer job as a stewardess; despite her mother's protests, Papa Green knew the value of learning the ropes from the very first rung up.“Do spend tomorrow getting acquainted with our wonderful Empress Queen and her numerous amenities; I personally recommend our luxurious spa and state-of-the-art virtual golf course. The rehearsal will be held on Tuesday, giving us Wednesday for any and all last-minute adjustments, and we’ll have the ceremony on Thursday. Reverend Hopkins is our onboard chaplain, and will be performing the service.”

On cue, the tall man next to her stepped forward, his hands clasped piously before him, visibly not as comfortable with discomfort as she was. “It’s a great honor to be marrying you, Miss Green,” he said, but cut himself short. _Oh no, you beautiful doofus._

“You'll be what now, Reverend?” exclaimed the groom-to-be, his arm wrapping around Alice’s waist possessively. “Maybe buy me a drink or two before you marry my fiancée?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stringfellow,” the chaplain stammered. “I misspoke. I meant-”

“Oh, lighten up, buddy. I’m just fuc- sorry, screwing with ya. Just don’t misspeak – or stutter, ugh- during the actual wedding, will ya?” 

_God, please do,_ she prayed intently, while Frank turned his devilish dark eyes to her.“Hey, Soon-to-be-Sis, you better have stocked up on that premium bourbon I asked for, and left a case in the Honeymoon Suite. Which, as I also specifically requested, now better have mirrors on the ceiling and a heart-shaped hot tub."

"Oh Frank, no!” gasped Alice, shoving him away forcefully. “I _insisted_ on 1896 Paris Art Nouveau, not 1986 Niagara Falls By-the-Hour Motel!” 

“Just fucking with you, babe,” he replied with a slap to her ass. _Always the gentleman, Frank_. “No, seriously though, Em, one major problem with that that fancy schedule of yours: when the hell’s the bachelor party?”

“The bachelor party’s anytime we’re not in her fancy schedule, Bro!” shouted a man from the hall. He was not clad in the cruise line’s signature green and white uniform, but in the most garish Hawaiian shirt and ostentatious sunglasses Emma had ever seen, as did the rest of the group of young men behind him. This time, she did not bother to hold her irritated sigh.

“Jimmy my boy! I knew there’d be no better best man for me! Finally, some good fuckin’ plannin’!” The two men embraced, slapping each other vigorously on the back. “You,” Frank then pointed to a helpless steward. “Take my stuff to my room, she’ll tell you which. And you,” he added with another clap to Jimmy’s chest. “Take me to the booze.” And without as much as a goodbye to their families, they stormed off, a frat boy riot of jeers, shouts and high fives.

Slowly, Emma returned her attention to her overly merry mother, her smug sister, the clueless captain and the confused churchman. “Well, boys will be boys,” dismissed the matriarch, to relieved chuckles all around. “But they are right. There is so much to celebrate! Young love, and such a brilliant match! Alexandria Line and Stringfellow Sails coming together, what a dream! Come, dear, let’s get you settled in.”

With a gracious gesture, she motioned for the remainder of the bridal party to follow them and she closed the parade with a touch to Emma’s arm. “Do come by shortly, darling, I want to review the menu for tonight,” she said. “I do hope you’ve given our family's famous desert its rightful place of honor.” _That ancient apple nightmare? Yeah, rightfully in the trash, Mother_ , but she only agreed meekly. 

The families gone, the crew followed suit with visible relief, until Emma was left with the silent reverend, who shuffled his feet, perhaps regretting not having managed to vanish along with the rest.

“Uh... my congratulations.” He somehow made it sound like both a question and an apology. “They seem... swell.”

She could only do what she was taught best to do in such cases: smile and nod. And scream internally so loudly that each and every one of her cells shook.

“I can hear that,” he said, startling her. _How the fuck-_ “The hamsters spinning, in your head. Something’s bothering you. Anything I can do to help?”

She looked at him, at the kind concern she’d seen so many times offered to the crew members on their long voyages away from friends and family, now focused solely upon her, and it was both wonderful and terrifying at once. She tucked an imaginary loose wisp of hair back into her bun and shrugged. “It’s nothing. Just the pressure of planning this event. It’s different when it’s... personal." _Like your harpy of a baby sister marrying your jackass of a high school sweetheart._

“I can imagine. Tall order you’ve got there. What was it, 1896 Art Deco?”

“Art Nouveau,” she corrected. “She’d have decapitated you for that mistake. Actually, no, that’s too swift and painless. Eviscerated’s more like it. With a blunt butter knife. Or her bare hands, if she hadn't just gotten her nails done.”

“Lovely. I see why the hamsters scamper thus; you’ve let the viper into their cage. You need a mongoose to chase it off: I might have just the thing.” 

Curious, she let him continue, cradling the leftover programs against her chest to muffle the embarrassingly loud drumming that emanated from it. “I have to cover for José at the jazz bar tonight, you should come by. I’ll make you the special drink I concocted for the occasion: the Blushing Bride. Now I see the name’s totally wrong. And the formula, too; I think it’ll need less subtlety and a lot more bitterness. Will you please help me?” he asked, leaning closer, with that somewhat shy smile of his that just begged to be kissed.

Instead, she pushed her glasses up her nose from the half-millimeter they had slid down, and felt in horror her body do that weird half-shrug, half-nod shuffle that it thought conveyed casual nonchalance. _Real smooth, nerd._ “If I’m released on time from that sure-to-be-extensive menu review... sure.”

“I’ll have you paged urgently at ten, something about the swan that’s being fattened for the wedding dinner,” he winked. “Or the peacocks they probably requested to act as ringbearers or footrests. Ha, Peacocks... that should be our safe word – uh, shit, **no,** uh... I meant _code_ word. Code!” _Oh no. He’s even more beautiful when he blushes._

_Oh shit. He said safeword... as in sex. Kinky sex. With him._

_Oh fuck. Now I’m blushing too. And my palms are sweaty. That’s gonna stain the paper. He can probably see it. Nooooo._

“I’ll... let you get to it, then,” he stammered again, backing away before waving awkwardly and turning to sprint. _Don’t look at his ass, don’t look at.... oh fuck me, I'm staring at a pastor’s ass. I’m going to Hell. I’m getting brutally murdered by my family first and going straight to Hell afterwards._

_I just have to find a way to stop the world’s worst wedding first, and have less than five days to do so, and a beautiful chaplain-cum-bartender that’s familiar with safewords to not fuck along the way._

_I'm so unbelievably screwed._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you crave more Alice and Frank and bourbon, read Broadway Baggins' great "Taking what I want, and call it Mine". Thank you for the inspiration! https://archiveofourown.org/works/23416393
> 
> I know that's not how you spell Pastor in the title... it was too easy a pun to pass on! I resisted putting it in the story, but no way I will again in the drink name. :P


	5. The Slippery Nipple

“I feel underdressed,” Mary said. Hissed, really. Char looked mildly sympathetic while Anne simply shrugged. She did that a lot. She was inured to snakes, serpents, anything that purported to be venomous. It was a trait that served her well in Crimea, less so as a wingwoman or squad-member.

“You’re fine. I mean, it’s kind of the point of the Margravine Lounge,” Char soothed. “And you did the winged eyeliner.”

“ _You_ did that. I sat still,” Mary said. The other women in the room were wearing the smallest scraps of fabric that could be consider cocktail dresses, nearly all of them synthetic based on the similarity to cling-wrap, and possibly all the mascara in the Northern hemisphere had been deployed. Anne and Char both wore outfits Mary had felt were inappropriate for anyone who had a college degree, Anne’s liberally garnished with sequins to emphasize every one of her impressively hoisted curves. Now they both blended right in and she looked like a nun in her sleeveless black jumpsuit, even though it was cut down to there. A bra-less nun or a Puritan, notwithstanding her pearl studs and the four-inch strappy sandals Char had insisted on. The hell of it was she didn’t have a sluttier outfit anyway, her little black dress even more demure. She hadn’t listened when Char had instructed her to bring something she couldn’t afford and now she was the one who looked like a hick or someone with a promise ring while every other woman in the room looked like she knew how to have a good time, partner or vibrator-induced.

“Shush,” Anne shushed firmly. Sometimes, she was quite succinct. Mary had discovered that was mostly not the case. However, Anne’s acidic take on nearly everything happening on the ship, from disco shuffleboard to the gold-leaf enhanced shrimp cocktail, was on point and more cruelly honest than Mary might have allowed herself to be, so they were managing as a triumvirate. Better thus far than either of the classical ones, but Mary wouldn’t bet against Anne pulling a Pompey. 

“You’re shushing me over a crummy lounge singer?” Mary asked.

“Are you daft? Your whinging away is unnecessary, since you’re clearly a 10 in a room full of 6s, and I’m trying to flag down a waiter for my next infusion of liquor,” Anne said but her eyes were glued to the man on the small stage whose size made him seem larger than life, not in a good way. His outrageously gelled hair was a factor as well, Mary conceded, adding at least 2 inches to his height.

“For those who missed it earlier, it’s Ladies’ Night in the Margravine Lounge and I am so, so happy to be here with all you lovely, lovely ladies,” Byron Hale smarmed into the mic. Mary wasn’t 100% certain smarmed was an actual verb but it was what he was doing and in snug faux-leather pants. 

“You want to look away, but you can’t,” Char said, still glancing around the room for any romantic prospects. It may have been Ladies’ Night, but that only meant there were plenty of guys milling around in club-wear, as if they were in a smoky bar in New York. The other evening options had been an all-you-can-eat lingonberry themed buffet (it was Tuesday and the celebrity chef B Gibson was off; whoever was covering had spent too much time at an Ikea cafeteria) or PJ Squivers in the Viceregina Salon. They’d already had a few run-ins with PJ, who evidently thought fishing a half-dollar from behind the ear of a grown woman was both magical and suave as was toting around a somehow limp top hat in whose depths God knows what mammal was sequestered. Though not Silas, not yet. Still, based on Hale’s warbling, Mary gave it even odds they’d be decamping for a series of sad card-tricks and a levitating bowl of kumquats. There’d surely be a shorter line at the bar and no one gyrating to Hale’s perplexing, though perfectly pitched, rendition of Aretha’s “Respect” complete with some determined pelvic thrusting the Queen of Soul could never have countenanced. Anne Hastings apparently could countenance it All Night Long. In the spirit of sisterhood, Mary mentally thought _Get it, girl!_ But her heart wasn’t really in it.

“I want a double mai tai,” Anne yelled into the general vicinity of the waiter she’d flagged down by waving her arm around until she hit someone. She was going to get something, either a drink or an assault charge.

“I’m sorry, miss, a double?” the waiter said. “I don’t think that’s a thing.”

“Fine. Get me the tequila flight and double it. And some potato skins, loaded, extra bacon, extra cheese, extra sour cream,” she said, shimmying to the music in her seat, which was a barstool she was precariously perched on. She must have glutes of steel to hang on.

“The loaded comes with all those,” the waiter said politely.

“Then I want it extra-loaded. Extra. Ultra. Supreme,” she said. “ _Capiche?_ ”

“As you wish!” the waiter said. Mary hoped it would win some sort of staff bingo card or that the waiter really liked _Princess Bride_.

“And by special, very special request from my heart to yours, on this most ladiest of Ladies’ Night, I give you: _Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene/ I'm begging of you please don't take my man/ Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene/ Please don't take him just because you can…_ ” Byron sang out, hitting notes Mary had not known were possible. Also, with every verse, his silk shirt became further unbuttoned, like the opposite of a miracle.

“I’m going to the bar,” Mary announced. Anne was glued to Byron’s gleaming (waxed? oiled? both?) pecs and Char had already attracted two reasonably handsome guys and was holding court. They’d be fine without her, unlike poor Jolene and her man.

“This is the fucking weirdest Ladies’ Night set I have ever heard,” Jed said to Henry, who was wiping down the bar kind of unnecessarily, except that a pretty young thing was carefully not-watching him do it. Jed couldn’t blame Henry, not even for rolling up his shirtsleeves to showcase his forearms, the tattoo inked at his wrist _Show the sun with a lantern_ ; Jed almost pitied a man who dreamed of Utopia and was stuck working as a pastor/bartender on a second rate cruise ship. Almost because he’d used up most of his pity on his own miserable ass. He hadn’t counted on how boring it would be to be the ship’s doctor. 

“You have a lot to compare it to?” Henry said. He could stop cleaning. The bar was pristine, you couldn’t culture one measly bacterial colony from it, not even staph, and Jed gave it no more than fifteen minutes before Pretty Young Thing sidled up and asked for something, maybe when Mass was. 

“Point taken. But I’m not deterred. So far, he’s done “Respect,” “Grandma’s Hands,” “9 to 5,” “Lemonade,” and now “Jolene.” And that Enya-Sinead mash-up,” Jed said. “His voice isn’t actually that bad, but the vibe in here is…bizarre.”

“Drunk people aren’t very picky,” a voice came from beside him. It was not Pretty Young Thing, who was unnecessarily and ostentatiously touching up her Cupid’s bow mouth with more bright pink lipgloss, it was Blue Sundress in a flowy jumpsuit that was about a million times sexier than any of the painted-on tube tops and mini-skirts favored by every other woman in the room. “Drunk people who want to get laid are even less so.”

Henry laughed. Jed rolled his eyes. Byron Hale swung his velvet frock-coat around in a circle over his head and someone pitched a potato skin onto the stage as tribute. Or critique—it wasn’t clear until Byron jammed it in his mouth, then moaned operatically at its presumed sheer deliciousness. Someone moaned back in a soprano.

“Now I know why there is so much penicillin on board,” Jed said. “It’s going to be a year of treating STDs. Annus Chlamydius Horrificus. I’ll grow to long for a migraineur wanting Fioricet.”

“You’re the ship’s doctor,” Sundress-Jumpsuit said. She mercifully didn’t reference their first encounter featuring the pot-bellied pig.

“I am. Dr. Jed Foster, at your service, 24/7,” he replied.

“Mary Phinney. 24/7, huh? You don’t get a break or anything? No cross-cover?” Mary, the woman-formerly-known-as-her-outfit, replied. He looked inquiringly at her and she shrugged. “I sort of work in the field. A couple of girlfriends and I are here together, getting some sun, some R&R, more umbrella-ed Cosmos than you can shake a stick at.”

“Let me guess—nurse? No, nurse-manager,” he said. She shook her head. 

“Just Mary. I’m on vacation,” she smiled. 

“Well, I have the pleasure of Reverend Henry’s company as consolation for no actual back-up,” Jed said, wishing the conversation could go somewhere, anywhere away from the Margravine Lounge; the deck was awash with pale blue moonlight and there was the balmy conservatory with its tropical plants, sure to be empty this time of night… Alas, he was stuck with Henry’s mop-rag and Byron Hale’s crooning, the cartoonish arc of a pair of beige Spanx headed right into Byron’s free hand.

“Can I buy you a drink at least?” Mary offered.

“That’s all right,” he said. 

“No really, it’s on me. Or my room tab. 1863,” she said to Henry.

“Okay, if you insist. A Shirley Temple, heavy on the Temple,” Jed said.

“Are you kidding me?” Mary asked at the same time as Henry said, “Is the Temple the grenadine then?”

“Yeah,” Jed said to Henry. “I’m on-call,” he directed at Mary, deciding revealing that he’d been sober for 6 months wasn’t likely to be super attractive, not that it could go anywhere anyway.

“I would have pegged you for a Freddie Bartholomew then,” she quipped. He looked at her blankly. “Little Lord Fauntleroy? They named a drink after him too. It’s a ginger ale and lime and it’s not pink.” He laughed and then Henry slid the mocktail in front of him. He’d added some candied ginger to the spike through the heart of the maraschino cherry. A little heat would be nice.

“Are we playing guess the drink? You won’t want something as obvious as a daiquiri or the aforementioned Cosmo so…a Bahama Mama,” Jed said, smiling at her.

“Sorry, you lose. Vodka martini, extra olives, not too dry,” she said to Henry. “Grey Goose if you have it.”

Before Jed could come up with something to salvage the repartee, Pretty Young Thing came right up to the bar and with the smallest glance at Mary that was not an apology, said, “Sex on the Beach and I don’t want to wait, Hank,” then turned on her kitten heel and pranced off to her table. She never looked back but her blonde ponytail bounced as come-hither-ly as ever a ponytail had. Jed wondered how long she’d had to practice to get it just right but maybe they covered that in cotillion these days.

“What a piece of work,” Jed said, unsurprised when Mary raised an eyebrow, although whether it was at the order, the manner, or the unauthorized and ill-advised use of Hank was hard to divine.

“That’s Alice Green, owner’s daughter,” Henry commented.

“Figures,” Jed said. “Princess. I know the type. _Hank_.”

“She’s getting married on board, maybe she wants a last fling,” Henry replied. He was at least making Mary’s drink first, set it before her gracefully, adding “On the house.”

“Thanks,” Mary said, taking a sip, making the kind of face that meant you felt like the top of your head was about to come off but cutely, even pursing her lips to let out the obligatory _Whew_. Unlike Alice, who must have used up an entire tube of lipgloss, Mary’s mouth was subtly red, as if she’d just eaten a ripe strawberry. Fuck, he wanted to kiss her, to taste Mary below the elusive sweetness of the vermouth, but medical ethics and that fucking poem To Lucasta ran through his mind and then Henry, an Ent-like chaperone with a shaker in his hands was watching them… “You make them strong.”

“I don’t believe in weak drinks,” Henry said. 

“Only Utopia,” Jed remarked.

“Not here I don’t. Excuse me, I’ve got to take care of that order,” Henry said, disappearing as if he were an actually successful trick pulled off by PJ Squivers. Just then, Byron Hale started yodeling _I just took a DNA test, turns out I'm 100% that bitch_ and Jed turned to Mary for her reaction.

But she was gone. He listened to Byron commit musical manslaughter and sang along a little, under his breath.

“… _we don't do goodbyes..._ " 

__He tossed back the Shirley Temple like it was a shot. Someone was sure to be paging him any minute, just not Mary. God help him if it was about the pig._ _


	6. Surfer on Acid

The ship had spent the day docked at Oranjestad: many passengers had chosen to visit the Aruban city and were progressively making their way back on board, filling the top deck for a few last hours of sun and pool before dinner beckoned. 

From an impatient voicemail –and the three follow-up texts- left on her phone, Emma had been called – well, rather, brutally summoned- there as well. Emerging from the bridge, she took a moment to breathe in the warm sea breeze, the sun crisp upon her face. The rhythm of tumba and conga filled the air, and the barbecue was still operating by the bar for the late lunchers. She saw with a pang that Manuel was tending it; she had barely seen Henry since her family’s embarkation, and the missed semi-business... consult... drink definitely non-date... _thing_ of the past evening weighed heavily upon her. 

Her mother’s Kir Royale-fueled “quick menu review” had turned into an evening-long dissection of every single choice she had made for the wedding, and in her professional career, and, while she was at it, her whole adult life, because why the hell not. She had managed a two-minute escape from the onslaught to check her phone, finding the notification bar unbearably empty. In desperation, she had quickly texted him “PEACOCKS” but the damn auto-correct had switched it to “PEE COCKS” right before she had pressed _send_ : in that agonizing second, her life had unravelled before her eyes, her shame and humiliation utterly complete, until Hastings _– Hastings?!?_ \- had replied with an enthusiastic thumbs up and two eggplant emoji. 

Receiving eggplant emoji from a complete stranger she had no recollection of ever saving into her phone right above _Hopkins, Henry_ was surely the biggest break the Universe would cut her tonight, and made her abandon all ideas of resending her SOS to its intended recipient. Yet despite it, once her mother had finally fallen asleep mid-rant, she had still made her way to the Margravine Lounge only to hesitate at the door, the somehow crooned notes of Salt-and-Pepa's greatest hit resonating through it, a final, ominous warning to turn on her heels and return to her little cabin, her littler porthole, and her littlest single, cold, very empty bed. 

Then as now, watching Manuel work the bar, she could just imagine Henry, hair slightly tousled, sleeves rolled up, leaning across the counter to hear her speak her request right to his ear, tossing a bottle and catching it behind him with a confidant wink, shaking up delicious drinks, offering maybe one too many, tying a cherry stem with just his tongue and daring her to try it...the cherry stem or the tongue, or both...? Both. Both is good. 

Her heart held its breath, while her body unleashed a thousand butterflies within its core. _You_ _giant dork. You blew it,_ they scolded her plaintively. _We wanted this s_ _oooooo_ _bad. We never get any fun!_

_But isn’t it for the best?_ her brain offered helpfully. _After all, he_ is _a coworker, and one we_ actually _like, and the cruise season’s just getting started, we shouldn’t mess it up so early in the game, and with just having 2 minutes to ourselves per day with this wedding planning... And what if we’d gone for it and it would NOT have been amazing? What if it’d actually been super awkward? What if it’d been... bad? Or even worse, just... meh? Isn’t meh sex actually worse than no sex at all?_

To which both her heart and body bitterly replied, _Oh for fuck’s sake. Fuck off._

So Brain was left to work alone, tasking frowning eyes to scan the deck, in search of their summoner, and propelling heavy legs to drag themselves and cross the distance to their target. 

Alice was seated in a lounge chair, in full sun, under a large floppy hat, wide sunglasses and wearing a hot pink bikini; and next to her, by her phone and frosty yellow drink, was a pig. 

Emma barely registered it. It wasn’t even the strangest sight to be seen. There was Byron and an unknown redhead by the bar, eating churros like they were Lady and the Tramp; PJ Squivers, shuffling cards and sporadically coughing in his afternoon cape as he tried to recruit a brunette cowering behind a large book to be his assistant; a grown-ass man deep asleep (or passed-out cold) afloat a giant rainbow unicorn in the deep end of the pool, his scalded back matching the red of his Speedo; a totally ripped woman shredding the waves on the surf simulator with two of Frank’s groomsmen watching, mouths gaping, beers in one hand, the other holding dropping towels suspiciously before them. 

_Just another classy day at sea on the_ _majestic_ _Empress_ _Queen._

She disregarded them all and made her way to her sister, who looked up from her fashion magazine and sighed loudly. “I had you called over ten minutes ago. What took you so damn long?” 

“Malibu Stacy,” she ignored her. “Plopper. I see you’ve upgraded fiancés. About time!” 

Emma could just feel the eye roll behind the tinted glass. “Jealousy doesn’t agree with your pasty complexion and ugly uniform, Sis. Anyway, it’s not mine, it’s Mrs. Brannan’s. Mama requested I watch him during their lesson.” 

She pointed to the pool, where Aurelia, the Wellness Coordinator, was energetically leading a mostly middle-aged, mostly female, and definitely not as energetic, group into an aquafitness class. Their mother was in the front row, moving as elegantly as one could while straddling a giant tangerine orange noodle. The neighboring lady’s extravagant bejeweled swim cap caught the sun and made Emma shift her gaze just as quickly. 

“Pity,” she said, taking the chair beside her sister. “And where is Prince Charming, exactly? The Frat Pack hit town?” 

“It's not town they’ve hit, but they did hit _something_ , apparently heavily and repeatedly,” Alice scowled. “Frank’s a bit... under the weather. He preferred to stay in today.” 

“He’s in his cabin?!” Emma exclaimed. “Wow, that’s unlike him... him and Jimmy have been drinking the pubs dry since they’ve been old enough to get believable fake IDs. And that’s typically on the same nights they’d smoke all the weed west of Founders’ Park. Glad to hear you’re having a mellowing influence in that department.” 

“Of course I am,” Alice replied, after perhaps the slightest of hesitations. “But maybe it’s something he ate: I thought the food tasted off at dinner last night. You should have that terrible cook fired.” 

Emma blinked in disbelief. “B Gibson is a _seven_ -star Michelin chef. She brought Southern cooking to the forefront of the culinary stage. Reservations are backed up for _months_ to get into her restaurants; even Meghan Markle can’t get a table. She cooked Not-Even-A-Real-Princess _-_ You the meal of a lifetime and you call it _off_ ? What is _wrong_ with you?!” 

“Well _excuse_ me for being a proud and free Republican and having non-Michelin-rated taste buds, but I didn’t think it was anything special. It was rather bland, actually.” 

“Oh my god!” cried Emma “The cilantro and tomatoes were grown onboard; they were so fresh you could smell the _pico_ _de_ _gallo_ across the deck... we ran out of nachos just from everyone else salivating for salsa! And the fried chicken was _cayenne pepper_ -crusted! I can’t.... just how many shots of Mamajuana did you have before the meal?!” 

Against all reason, Alice only smirked then. “Oh, I had a few _after_ , along with some nice, sweet, juicy Sex on the Beach from Hot Hank at the Margravine. That man sure knows how to quench a woman's... thirst.” 

To Alice’s visible triumph, Emma went cold, the color draining from her face; but just as quickly as it had fallen, it rose back again, bubbling with outrage, and she would have reached out for the pig’s leash to violently strangle her sister with it if a woman hadn’t appeared by her side then. “ _Pardon?_ Miss Green? I'm so sorry for being late, it was difficult to tear myself away from Aruba. Such a beautiful place!” 

Alice eyed the newcomer with barely veiled envy, her elegant yet casual outfit the love child _Bon chic bon genre_ and Parisian bohemian would have conceived on a safari, an expensive-looking camera around her neck. “Uh... who the fuck are you?” 

“This is Lisette Beaufort,” Emma interrupted, standing to shake the new arriver’s hand. "Thank you for making it on such short notice; my sister, Alice Green, who’s getting **_married_** this week. Alice, Mme Beaufort is a world-renowned photographer. She has kindly agreed to shoot your wedding. Isn’t that amazing?” 

Both women smiled - one kindly, the other threateningly - at the bride-to-be, who just glared at them from over her sunglasses. “Huh. World-renowned. Is that right?” 

“I’ve had some of my work published,” Lisette said humbly, and turned her camera on. “May I show you some photos I took in a little village on the way to Conchi today? I was blessed that it was market day and -” 

Alice cut her short with a wave of her hand and grabbed her phone with the other, making Silas squeal in the process. “What’s your Insta? How many followers you got?” 

_I’m so sorry,_ Emma mouthed to Lisette, who shrugged it off, good-naturedly. “Just my name, in one word. Quite simple, like my photos. I don’t use many filters, I try to capture the natural beauty of the world, just as it is.” It might have sounded pretentious or downright annoying coming from most people, but maybe it was the earnest smile, the dreamy demeanor, but Emma found herself buying it. 

Alice did not seem so inclined; after many failed trials at spelling the name (“Oh, Bew-FORT. Why didn’t you just pronounce it properly?”), her finger swiped through the site’s offerings, her lips pursed. She must not have hated what she saw, as no snap judgment was spoken. Instead of waiting for it to land, Emma turned to Lisette. “May I?” she asked, pointing to the camera. 

“Of course.” She removed the strap from around her neck and handed her the instrument, as one might cradle a newborn. “Just press this button to navigate. It starts here.” 

Emma looked appreciatively at the screen: it was truly a lovely image. The ship’s top deck, deserted, awash in pink light from a lone ray of sunlight, all lounge chairs perfectly aligned like soldiers awaiting inspection around the pool, in which a few salmon clouds were reflected on its mirror surface. The only sign that this ethereal beauty was indeed the trainwreckthat was the _Empress Queen_ was the presence, in the dead center of the shot, of a giant rainbow unicorn, with a man deep asleep – or passed-ou- 

“Hang on,” said Emma. “When was this taken?” 

“Oh, at dawn this morning. I’m afraid I’m quite the early bird, for only then is the light-” 

No longer listening, Emma’s eyes rose in apprehension from the pool in the photograph, to the one before her. Much fuller, and brighter, and livelier, but it was the same giant unicorn. And the same red Speedoed man. 

And with horror, she recognized her brother. 

“Oh shit, no,” she gasped, quickly handing Lisette back her camera, who followed the younger woman’s gaze. “ _B_ _ordel..._ _il_ _est_ _encore l_ _à_ _, le con?_ ” she said to no one, as Emma was already half-walking, half-running to the pool. 

Trying to keep her composure so as not to stir a panic amongst the passengers, she swung by the bar. “Manuel, quick, call the medic,” she said, hitting the counter for emphasis. The sudden noise made Byron and his probable paramour start, dropping the dripping _chicharonnes_ they had been feeding each other. 

“Medics? What’s wrong, Miss Green?” asked the lounge singer, scoffing as he wiped sauce from his lap. However, his companion immediately jumped up. “I’m a nurse, I can help,” she offered. 

“That man, in the pool, on the unic...” Emma tried to explain, the tremor in her voice barely checked. “He’s been there all day, Jimmy, he hasn’t moved...” At this, her legs buckled, and the Englishwoman barely managed to hold on to her. Scanning the crowd for options, she located her friend. 

“Char! _Char_! **_Charlotte!_ ** ” shouted Anne loudly, to no effect. “ **JENKINS,** **you** **deaf slag**!” 

That finally managed to draw the Ripped Surfer’s attention irritably away from her conversation with her two young admirers. “The fuck you want, Anne?” 

“Unicorn!” she pointed, her other arm tight around Emma’s waist to stabilize her. 

“Unicorn?! You on acid or - oh.” Charlotte saw the mythical animal in question, frowned at the immobile, sunbaked man atop it, and immediately dove into the pool. With five powerful strokes, she reached the unicorn and started pulling it to the edge. 

Anne gently sat Emma on her stool, rubbing her back for comfort. “There, dear, you just sit there for a minute, Charlotte will have him out in a jiffy, we’ll take good care of him. Manuel, some water, please? And Christ on a bike, Byron, get off that fine arse of yours and help, will you? Go fetch the insufferably leggy brunette that’s too nice to shove those bloody cards down that damn magician's throat. She deserves every bit of it, sputum and all, but now this sorry bastard needs her more than I need my ten dollars’ worth of “magical” entertainment. Let’s see if she’s as hot a doctor as she is in a bikini reading... oh for crying out loud, _The Hot Zone_ ?! … is that nerd doing it on purpose or she’s truly, unbearably so clueless? Byron, stop faffing around, just be gone already! No, leave it, that’s _my_ piña colada. There, love, don’t you worry, he’s in very capable hands. You holding up? There’s a dove, just sit tight, I’m going to go give them a hand. Manuel, keep an eye on her, will you?” 

Had the nurse meant to say all this out loud, or had Emma suddenly acquired telepathic abilities? She wasn’t so sure. Neither especially made sense. _Well, nothing makes sense anymore, in this very special, magic mystery tour at sea on the majestic_ _Empress Queen,_ laughed the unicorn _. I am he as you are he as you are me. And we are all together._

From the depth of her daze, she watched as if in a movie, the three women and the lounge singer attend to Jimmy, dismounting him from his noble steed, whisking him off to a shaded area, the pool attendants cordoning off the noisy passersby as so many squires protecting their gallant fallen knight. 

_See how they fly like Lucy in the sky?_

She heard, as if in a badly autotuned mix tape, her sister and mother finally comprehend the situation, shrieking and screaming in almost melodious harmony with a pot-bellied pig. 

_See how they run like pigs from a gun?_

She saw, as if in a dream, her fingers turn on her phone, swipe to the text message function, and send a peacock emoji to a certain _Hopkins, Henry._ She hoped her dream got it right, this time. 

_I’m crying._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am the walrus, coo coo cachoo. Thank you The Beatles for such absurdity.
> 
> Emma mistakenly texting Anne makes no sense because these two haven't technically met yet, but I wanted to honor The Tipsy Tag Typo That Triggered a Tumblr Trepidation (ok I'm unduly proud of this octagonal alliteration ;) We have our own fandom Easter Eggs now!


	7. Corpse Reviver No.2

“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” Jed said as he dropped to his knees to get a closer look, his tone more leisurely than any other part of him despite the overwhelming likelihood that it was yet another case of alcohol poisoning plus or minus some sunstroke. The man’s belly was Filet o’ Fish flounder white and his back was the satisfying crimson of a properly steamed lobster, ready for cracking and the near-religious immersion in drawn butter, but he had to make an effort, however unimpressive, at practicing medicine. Especially since the man was in some way attached to the owners; Jed recognized Mrs. Green pacing despite her bug-eyed frenzy and expensively drab bathing costume and the young women beside her were clearly her daughters, rocking a Snow White and Rose Red vibe, except that Snow White looked like she might have a dollop of true compassion in her and Rose Red was wailing something about her bachelorette night being _fucking ruined!_ and sundae toppings.

“jimmyjimmyjimmy!” Rose Red screeched. She was pitchy, she’d get voted off in the first round of American Idol, let alone The Voice, and then Jed realized it was the given name of the meat slab he was trying to rouse with a determined sternal rub. “Meat slab” was actually generous, since the man was fairly scrawny and could probably qualify for pectus excavatum. The red Speedo had been a bold and ill-advised decision but probably one of many, given the horrible sunburn, the soul patch and overlong sideburns and the persistent reek of cheap liquor and cheaper weed.

“Come on, Jimmy,” Jed said firmly. It felt like he was roughly massaging one of those white liver bratwursts they liked in upstate New York. “Wake up. Someone get me my bag, like now.”

“His pupils aren’t pinpoint,” Jed heard as he rifled through his bag looking for the Narcan. He glanced up long enough to register it was Mary, from the sundress and the bar, now in a daringly cut black bikini that made him momentarily extremely grateful he knew her name and wasn’t going to be thinking of her as Sundress-Jumpsuit-Bikini while he ran a code.

“Won’t hurt,” he said, injecting Jimmy.

“Won’t help,” Mary said. “I got some history from his family before you got here, why don’t you let me—”

“It’s under control,” Jed said. “I’m good.”

“Really? Doesn’t look that way,” Mary said, digging through his woefully jumbled bag to pull out a stethoscope. “Allheart? I would’ve thought you’d have a Littman Classic III. Can you even hear a Grade 6 murmur with this thing?”

“That’s not mine, that came with the sick-bay,” Jed muttered. Jimmy was starting to make some grunting sounds, at least he thought it was Jimmy. God help him if it was the pig nosing around for a stray truffle or Kit-Kat, though Jimmy definitely didn’t have any spare pockets worth checking out, compliments of the Speedo.

“You came to see a patient without your own stethoscope?” Mary asked, incredulous but not snide, sounding like one of the nicer attendings he’d had when he was an intern, not the ones who would have condemned him to a solid week of brutally dull scut-work for being so ill-prepared, after thoroughly humiliating him for the rest of rounds. He’d had to take it then but right now, he was the goddam senior physician on the _Empress Queen_ and she was a nurse in a bikini. A hot one, but still.

“I don’t remember asking a random nurse to help. Or opinions,” Jed said curtly. Someone he couldn’t see barked out a laugh _Hahaha_ as if from an old movie. “Clear out. I need space to take care of this patient.”

Mary moved away swiftly, giving Jed a wide berth and plenty of the room he’d demanded, murmuring “Ass” under her breath as if he couldn’t hear her. Just then, Jimmy decided to prove he’d returned to the land of the living and that Jed had been onto something asking Mary to move aside, by throwing up all (all! As if he were trying to get points for completeness!) over Jed’s chino-ed knees, opening his eyes blearily and croaking “Shitcakes” which pretty much summed up the whole encounter. 

“Take it from an actual nurse, luv, and run at least 3 liters of fluid. Normal saline, not that Ringer’s shite surgeons like,” came the clarion call in a British accent from a blonde in a sheer, heavily sequined caftan, sitting next to still-trembling Snow White Green. Sam and Manuel had come over with a stretcher they hefted Jimmy onto like a sturgeon Jed was going to harvest roe from and Jed was trying to get up without getting Jimmy’s 40 proof vomit on his hands, so it wasn’t until he was back in the sick bay, taping off Jimmy’s IV with the recommended bag of fluid hanging that he heard again what she’d said. An _actual_ nurse. Which meant Mary was not— but it didn’t tell him who she really was. Besides simply another woman who’d summed him up, quite efficiently, as an asshole. His streak remained unbroken.

“Well, all I’m saying is he could have listened,” Mary said. Her pina colada was virgin, but she took a slug like it was filled to the brim with Bacardi. Anne and Char were up to their boobs in the hot tub but Mary sat on the edge, where she still had a view of the aft deck and the 80s blue eyeshadow sky.

“That is 100% not all you are saying and you’ve been saying it for a good half-hour, girlfriend,” Char replied. “He got his come-uppance—that dude Jimmy puked pretty impressively for someone who’d been out for that long and his aim was perfect. Those chinos were **destroyed**. He did have a nice butt though, Foster, his shoulders were okay too,” she mused. She did stop short of licking her lips.

“Char!”

“Mary!” Char mimicked. “What’s really bugging you? This is supposed to be your, our glorious, tropical vacay, and it was just a drunk guy in a Speedo who had too many shots. I mean, the Speedo was the most unusual part—who’s still buying those? Did he wear it on a dare? What a fucking perv!”

“Probably ran out of clean underwear,” Anne offered as if she spoke from experience. “It’s risky going commando when you’re bar-hopping in the Caribbean.”

“Something stinks about this,” Mary said.

“I know, I know, your fine sensibilities were offended, the pretty boy with the beard didn’t fall at your feet as you scolded him for having a cheap-arse stethoscope. Even in a bikini, most men aren’t going to go wild for being negged like that,” Anne said.

“No, that’s—whatever, I don’t care about another hot-shot, know-it-all, full of himself male doctor shoving me aside—" Mary said.

“Paging Dr. Freud here, but I think you do, Mairsy-Doats,” Char laughed.

“And cruise ship doctor isn’t exactly a hot-shot position,” Anne said. “Which I think this one gets—one could sense how much he lusts after a department chair and instead he’s here. There was something about the eyes, a sort of wry, hopeless, self-loathing. It was his most attractive feature, after his sweet, sweet arse.”

“You could see anything besides Byron…and those churros?” Char remarked.

“No, I mean—that guy was drunk and sunburned but there was something else. I have a bad feeling about this,” Mary said.

“Oh, she has a bad feeling! On the bloody beautiful, luxurious _Empress Queen_ , where tequila and chocolate fondue run like water, the churros are rainbow, and the floaties are unicorns; the spirit animal is a pot-bellied pig, but, but…she has a bad feeling!” Anne said, orating as if she were auditioning for a made-for-TV movie, not on Hallmark. Lifetime probably, not edgy enough for Netflix.

“Fine. Whatever,” Mary said though it must be readily apparent that it was neither fine nor whatever. She wiggled her feet in the spa’s bubbles as if that meant she was relaxed. She’d learned that she sometimes recognized a problem before she could clearly identify it and she knew, whatever Anne or Char said, that something was up and not in a good way. The story didn’t quite hang together, a night out at a bar, a sunburn… recent travel through a crowded airport, Alice ranting about how Jimmy had chatted up a gorgeous Italian woman for the whole flight and hogged all the Cristal, the reports out of China, the chatter on the epi listserv, the _Hot Zone_ … She wouldn’t keep harping on it to Char and Anne but she wasn’t going to let it go either. She picked up her phone and started typing out a message to some like-minded colleagues who weren’t simmering in a hot tub like Char and Anne. They continued to play fuck, marry, kill with everyone they could think of on board the ship, including fictional characters once they’d reached Silas the pig and had an extended discussion about bacon and summer sausage, heavy (because it was Anne and Char) on the sausage.

“I got your text. But, um, are you… unwell? I don’t mean to be rude-- you look pale,” Henry said. He was a little breathless, as if he’d run all the way to her cabin, leaving behind what—a bar full of eager day-drinkers or a near-empty chapel or something else? Someone else? She couldn’t be the only woman, only person really, who found him attractive and maybe someone else had the balls or ovaries or do something about it. It would be just her luck to have missed her one chance with Henry, maybe to someone like soignée Lisette or who knows, that brassy but oddly consoling nurse Anne, or God forbid (really, God, he’s Your servant, You have to watch his back), reckless Alice on the eve of her wedding. If she took up with Henry and Frank found them in flagrante, that would be an end to it but God, what an end!

“I’m fine, you’re kind to ask. There was a situation, I got a little rattled,” she said, waving her hand a little. He never stopped looking straight in her eye and his were such a dusky, twilit blue…

“A situation?”

“My brother Jimmy drank himself into a stupor, in a Speedo, and basically braised his back, sans shallots. Dr. Foster had to be called, I just, I remember when he wasn’t like that all the time and…” Emma explained. She and Jimmy had been thick as thieves when they were little, Alice the perpetual pestering tag-a-long on the adventures Emma and Jimmy devised, rambles through the woods, the box-fort in the attic; Emma never minded that Jimmy was slower because of his bad foot and he always let her be whatever she wanted, not just the mother playing house or the nurse playing hospital. Then he got his operation, spent a long time at a rehab, came home essentially fit and devoted all his time to getting in with the popular crowd of boys at his new prep school. He occasionally gave her a wistful look but those had grown increasingly rare. She might be the only one who remembered their tree-house, the time capsule they’d buried, the letter in a bottle they’d labored over for a week before chucking it out into the surf on Amelia Island.

“I’m sure he’ll be okay—he’s in good hands with Dr. Foster,” Henry said.

“Right, yes. That’s not why, that’s not why I texted you,” she said. Why did his voice have to sound like dark chocolate and Calvados and B Gibson’s world-famous espresso crème brulée?

“Oh, sorry.” He crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap neatly. His polo was buttoned, his trousers sharply creased and she wanted nothing more than to tear his clothes off and ravish him. Well, almost nothing more.

“I need you to promise that whatever happens, you won’t marry my sister,” Emma said. _Fuuuuck.Ravissement_ , her high school French supplied her, that’s what she wanted, Henry blushing, trembling, gasping beneath her…

“No wedding. No way, no how. No matter what it takes,” he said. Like it was easy as pie. Henry and B Gibson’s silky Swiss meringue—would it be a sin or a miracle?

“It’s going to take everything we’ve got,” Emma said, finally breathing out. Henry smiled, angelically. Devilishly. Hot damn.

“Oh, Mary, I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to apologize for—” Jed began.

“Stop,” she said, holding up her hand, pretty close to his face. It was just this side of rude and he responded to that. “Dr. Foster, my name is Dr. Mary Elizabeth Phinney. I have my MD from Yale, my MPH from Columbia, my PhD in epidemiology from Hopkins and a position at the CDC. And I’m telling you if you don’t lock this ship down today, quarantining the whole thing, isolation precautions, unless you do everything I tell you, exactly how I tell you, we are going to be sitting on a floating graveyard.”

“What the actual fuck?” Jed said. Was that anger or embarrassment or just pure shock? Mary didn’t have the time to figure it out.

“What the actual fuck indeed,” she replied evenly. “We’re hours from a total disaster, epic proportions. Fortunately, we have a chance.”

“A chance?”

“One. Singular. I suggest you take it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Emma was maybe not the best high school French student and she maybe relied too much on Google Translate because "ravissement" just means "beautiful/pleasing" as clarified by actual French speaker Sagiow :)
> 
> A Grade 6 murmur is one you can hear without the stethoscope actually being on the patient's chest. The Littman III Classic is considering the top stethoscope. Jimmies are an alternate name for ice cream sprinkles. "White hots" are liver bratwursts which are pretty pale. Pectus excavatum is a structural deformity of the anterior thoracic wall in which the sternum and rib cage are shaped abnormally. This produces a caved-in or sunken appearance of the chest.


	8. Peacock's Fancy

“Quarantine?!” 

They were standing in the bridge, doctors versus sailors. Well, the sailors part was clear: both the captain and the first mate were impeccably dressed in crisp white uniforms with their hats straight, their shoes shined to as bright a polish as to reflect the sun setting across the surrounding full-length windows. The doctors were... not so polished. 

Mary had thankfully changed from her highly distracting bikini to an only slightly less so flowing tunic, shorts and sandals. Jed, however, had decided to take the vomit-induced change opportunity to hit the gym, and been interrupted mid-workout by her arrival and immediate request (demand? command? order?) that they escalate the matter to the authorities. He now stood awkwardly in a sweaty t-shirt, runner shorts, and Vibram FiveFingers shoes. And legs. Way too much legs. 

“Yes, quarantine,” Mary said, obvious to his decorous discomfort. “We have to shut the ship down. Nobody gets off, nobody comes on. This must be contained.” 

“What is _this_ , exactly?” asked Summers, a reticent frown upon his brow. “To hear you speak, Dr. Phinney, we have an epidemy of leprosy on board.” 

Mary shook her head. “No, leprosy is nothing comparable. It’s caused by a bacterium, _Mycobacterium leprae._ It -” 

“What Dr. Phinney is trying to convey,” Jed interrupted her softly, fearing a microbiology lesson might have the opposite effect on the old sailor. “Is that we believe this might be a serious virus or contaminant and we must do all we can to prevent it from spreading any further. It might be too late for many people on board, but we can at least avoid contaminating the islands.” 

The Captain’s frown deepened, his eyes darting worriedly from the doctors to his first mate, who crossed his arms gravely. “I think this is worth considering, Capt-” 

“Well, well, what seems to be the matter here?” 

All four turned to the man who had just strolled in, Southernly groomed in his double-breasted suit and goatee, channelling a version in gray of Colonel Sanders and suddenly making Jed crave even more the legendary B Gibson Fried Chicken that had been the matter of rapturous whispers among the crew these last days. 

“Mr. James Green, CEO of Alexandria Line,” the man introduced himself, cutting the doctor’s delicious dreams to a crispy end. “Captain Summers had me called as soon as you docs mentioned your medical emergency.” 

“Thank you for coming, Sir,” Mary said. “And for taking this seriously.” 

“Oh, I’m afraid we’re not understanding each other, darlin’. We ain’t shutting down nothing.” 

Jed watched Mary’s beautiful face turn to one of utter shock, either from the paternalistic tone and nickname, or from her immediate dismissal, and most probably both. 

“Do you think this is the first bug on board?” Green derided her in his slight drawl. “This is a _cruise ship_ ; people get sick from too much food, drink, sun, trying out local specialties on land, hooking up with random strangers, you name it. Colds, stomach flus, influenza, all fair game. We have a stellar record with respect to norovirus infections, but again, it’s a _cruise ship_ , we’re not immune to it, and we especially don’t shut down because of it. That’s why we have a medical bay and a morgue and Dr. Legs- uh, sorry, Foster, here, on staff.” 

“Sir, you are grossly underestimating this,” Jed took over. “We fear this isn’t your garden variety norovirus. This is potentially much more serious, and contagious, if the reports are true.” 

“I _f the reports are true_? So you want me to idle my ship without any proof of what you’re ascertaining? Can you imagine the complaints, the lawsuits, the refund requests? You’ll have me bankrupt and on the occasion of my baby girl’s wedding, too!” 

“We assure you it’s going to be much worse if you don’t,” Mary insisted. 

“Based on what? My nincompoop of a son getting himself wasted to the point of oblivion? My daughter’s cretin of a fiancé being a liwwle bit tiwed with a scwatchy thwoat? Irritably embarrassing, yes, but not show-stopping.” 

“Maybe not now, but they might’ve infected dozens on board already,” Jed countered. “We need to implement social distancing measures, reduce the size of gatherings, have people stay in their cabins-” 

“Hold your horses,” Green interrupted him. “Listen, doctors, I’m a man of business. You are, allegedly, people of science. So get me hard, scientific evidence that _uno_ , there is a virus, and _two-o_ , that all your shitty, reputation-destroying measures are actually gonna be effective, and then we’ll talk quarantine. Until then, Dr. Phinney, take it easy, enjoy your vacation, and hey, have some surf n’ turn and a nice bottle of Cab at the Admiral’s Steakhouse, on the house. And bring Dr. Foster after he’s done checking on Junior... and finds himself some appropriate clothes. For cryin’ out loud, Doc.” With this, he turned on his heels and exited the same way he had come in, Captain Summers skittering along after him like an eager Clumber Spaniel. 

Diggs looked at them both, a concerned expression on his handsome features, and shook his head. 

“I’m sorry, Dr. Phinney, Dr. Foster. For all our sakes, I hope you’re wrong. But if you’re not, please come right to me if there’s any change, I’ll do what I can to implement the measures you see fit.” 

Jed took that as as good a dismissal as they were likely to get, and held the door opened for Mary to exit the bridge. A few steps further along in the corridor, there was a bench, and Mary heavily dropped down to it, her face buried in her palms, a sound somewhere between a groan and a sigh escaping from behind them. “Well that went terribly,” she finally uttered. 

“I wouldn’t say that... Diggs seems open to your theory and plan, and Summers is so scared of both you and Green he’ll bend whichever way the wind blows stronger. We just need to find a way to convince the father of the bride and we’ll have the _green_ light to make every passenger’s life absolutely miserable.”

“Even with that terrible pun, that's not exactly helpful pep talk, Dr. Foster,” she said wearily, leaning back against the panelled wall of the corridor. 

“Jed, please.” He sat down next to her. “If we’re gonna be Fighting the Power and a nasty virus together, I want us to be on first name basis. I know I deserve to call you Dr. Phinney forevermore for having been so brutally wrong about your credentials – not that there’s anything wrong with nurses, not at all, they are absolute essential heroes - but please... may I call you Mary?” 

He did appear awfully contrite, and too dead in the soul to be the kind to give it any kind of secondary meaning. There was that hopeless self-loathing in his dark eyes that Anne had admired, and for once, she found herself agreeing with Charlotte’s abrasive friend. The realization drew a soft smile from her. 

“That’s the first name I gave you, back at that hallucinatory Ladies’ Night Lounge Act; it’d be wrong of me to take it back.” 

He looked quietly pleased for an instant, a crease appearing in his bearded cheeks, and he nodded. “So what’s our next step, Mary?” he asked, giving the two syllables an extra emphasis that caused a slight flutter in her chest. 

She sighed. “I’ll contact my future supervisor at the CDC, try to get some executive order or something equally scary to shut Green down. Considering what time it is, I don’t know if I’ll have it before we dock in Bonaire, though. And people get off, and the whole thing reaches another circle of hell.” 

“The CDC has to have a BatPhone for events like this, I’m sure you’ll get it in time.” She saw him get struck with a thought, mentally juggle with it, and then turn to her with a tentative expression. “But in the meantime, rather than wait by the fax machine for that miraculous paper to come in... I’d say that steak dinner sounds mighty tempting.” 

She was too surprised to answer. Sensing her hesitation, he quickly continued: “Listen, I don’t mean this flippantly, but if these are our last few hours of relative peace before the Alexandria Line Apocalypse, I can think of worse ways to spend them than with someone I need to make up to, over a nice meal I don’t have to spend a buck on.” 

“That’s... honest,” she appreciated. “But I don’t think it’s safe. We should be setting an example; going out in a packed restaurant would kill our credibility.” 

“Think of it as epidemiologic field work. We’ll scout for potential symptoms, scope out the true extent of our problem. Discuss containment strategies over porterhouse with Bordelaise sauce and baked potatoes dripping in butter.” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and she struggled against the tugging at the corner of her lips. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” she finally said, firmly, and sat up straighter. “I’m.... vegan.” 

As the blood drained from this face, she finally lost the fight against her smile, and let it win with a bright peal of laughter. “No, no, I'm kidding.... oh hell no. I tried once, I just... can’t. Probably completely horrible of me, but I think animals are too damn tasty.” 

“Oh, thank God. And there I thought you weren’t perfect anymore and that just near well broke my heart.” 

From the teasing intensity of his gaze, the flutter intensified. “Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t we, Dr. Foster?” she said, to convince herself as well. 

“Jed, I said. And you didn’t say no to that meal. So, tell you what: I’ll be at the Admiral’s at nine, should be fairly quiet then, we can get a table far away from the hubbub. I’ll be wearing a tux because I packed it and it looks like this is gonna my last shot to wear it, so like a gentleman on the Titanic, if the ship’s gonna sink, I’ll look damn good while going down.” He stood and bowed elegantly, or as elegantly as one could in short shorts and fingered shoes. “I really hope you’ll join me, Madam.” 

And with a last smirk, he trotted off, leaving Mary with yet another dilemma to sort, this time all the more painful as the obviously wrong answer was so terribly tempting. 

* * *

Back at their room, Mary had plopped down miserably on her bed to brief Anne and Charlotte on the latest developments, or lack thereof, to which both had commiserated and offered support and ideas for their future plan of attack. Her only mistake has been to mention “steak” and “tuxedo” in the same sentence. 

Immediately, Charlotte had asked her Red Cross contact to please hold, while Anne had sighed dramatically and opened the wardrobe. “Get up. You’re going,” Charlotte had hissed, her hand over the receiver. 

“What? I can’t. We have a potential pandemic on our hands.” 

“And you’re lying on a bed whining about it. It’ll still be there in a couple hours after you take up Dr. Sweetcheeks on that date.” 

“Dr. Swee- _God_ , **no** , we’re not calling him that.” 

“Yes, we are,” Anne confirmed, taking two dresses from the poles. "This was thoroughly discussed and settled in the hot tub while you were disappointingly failing with the brass. More importantly now: red or green?” 

“Red, go Gryffindor!” Charlotte settled before Mary could open her mouth. “Oooooh he won’t make it ‘til dessert with you in that. Take him back here, Anne and I are hitting 90s karaoke night, I can crash with her afterwards, room’s aaaall yours.” 

“Have you all gone insane?” Mary cried, dodging the dress tossed at her head. “This isn’t the time for songs and sex! We have a crisis to deal with.” 

“It’s _always_ time for songs and sex, just period-appropriate ones,” Charlotte corrected. “Seriously, what else is there better to do in quarantine?” 

“Well, we’re not in quarantine _yet_ and you’re planning on hitting a club and sharing a mike with a bunch of potentially infected people. Can you at least wear masks?” Mary pleaded. 

“Masks. At karaoke night,” Anne scoffed, now rummaging through Charlotte’s jewellery. “How in hell did you get four university degrees with such bloody daft ideas? We need to blend in: the owner’s daughter is having her bachelorette party there tonight: if her brother’s sick, odds are another tosspot in that lot will be too. We’ll be on the lookout for any sneeze or cough; that might get Papa to take action. Ooh, those are gorgeous,” she added, dangling sparkling earrings in hand. 

“Niiiice, yesss,” Charlotte agreed. “And first sniffle we spot, we’ll call you and that First Mate Diggs, swear to God. Now get your ass dressed and don’t be stingy on mascara. Oh, and get the “Bombshell” lipstick from my purse. Anne will help with your hair. I really gotta get back to this woman, she has extra supplies in Kralendijk I might be able to get tomorrow.” 

The mention of hair made Mary look wearily up at Anne, and then more intently. “... since when are you blonde?” 

“I’ve always been blonde.” 

“No, you had red hair,” Mary insisted. 

“You calling me a ginger?! The nerve!” Anne stood before her, the brush in one hand, the curling iron in the other. “You want my help or not?” 

Mary groaned. “I don’t want ** _any_** of this!!” 

“Then you’re definitely getting it. Maybe once you get some meat in you, both literally and figuratively, you’ll be more appreciative and sensible. Now get up." 

_This is completely bonkers,_ Mary winced, while a brush was roughly drawn through her hair. _Karaoke and lipstick and steak and Dr._ _Sweetcheeks_ _._ _Oh_ _fuck now I’m doing it too._

* * *

Karaoke Night at the Commodore’s was every bit as crazy as it should be. Byron Hale was hosting – because of course he would be- and the ratio of female to male was in the double digits. Every song so far had been thanks to a former boys or girls band, or “edgy” alternative rock group ( _whatever happened to alternative as a genre_? Charlotte wondered) and the earlier 90s stuff was met with the dense non-sound of uuuuugggggghhhh. Unless it was Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston or Céline Dion and then the Shriek-O-Meter would be in the double digits as well. 

Charlotte had her drink, something tropical with way too much Midori the sullen yet sexy bartender called a Peacock’s Fancy, and from its horizon she scoped out the room. There was Alice Green, the owner’s daughter, in a fucking tiara and “Bride to be” sash, like she was some legit beauty queen while she was way too skinny for that. She was surrounded with a cotillion of white girls with probably ridiculous made-up name like Makayla or Brooklyn or something else with too damn many unnecessary Y’s and K’s. Anne had been useful for exactly 2.5 minutes until the Spice Girls had come on and she’d run to the stage, “Oh my Gooood, that’s my tuuuune!” and she was doing the _Stop_ dance along with other random chicks at the mike. 

She seriously hoped this sacrifice was worth something, that Mary and Sweetcheeks had tossed the Red Slayer of Hearts Dress overboard (well, maybe not _overboard_ , that dress was designer) and were destroying her bed’s springs (shit, it better be _her_ bed), because so far, aside from a few murdered high notes and a bridesmaid briskly evacuated to the restroom after one whipped cream-topped shot too many, there was nothing to report, to the CDC or any other worthy authority. 

“Drink’s not up your alley?” 

It was the bartender, dressed in an unbuttoned plaid flannel over a Nirvana black t-shirt and what she expected to be either acid-washed jeans or cargo pants, extra on the baggy. "No, drink’s fine, lovin’ the melon. I’m just on watch duty.” 

“Watch duty?! I’ve heard about plenty of weird things but that’s a first. What are you watching out for? Criminals on the loose? Ghosts? Ill-advised use of twerking? I’ve definitely seen some of that.” 

She chuckled. “No, more medically-wise. You catch anyone looking sick? Cold and flu stuff? Anyone order hot gin with honey and lemon, coughed in the bar nuts?” 

“Not that I recall,” he pondered. “I got plenty of orders for Sex on the Beach and Orgasms and Blowjobs, but that’s all fairly standard fare for these types of events. But there was that one Shirley Temple earlier, that was pretty unnerving.” 

“Yeah, that’s one person with issues,” Charlotte confirmed. “Still, if you see someone feeling off, call me over, okay?” 

“Sure, but whatever for?” This guy was polite; most would have said _why the fuck do you care?_ Or she was just spending too much time with Anne. 

She shrugged, not wanting to cause a panic. “Probably nothing, but just be on the lookout, okay?” 

He nodded, until a dim vibration was heard, and he eagerly fished his phone from his back pocket, only to swipe it with annoyance. ”Not the booty call you were expecting?” she risked with a sip of her layered drink, hitting mostly amber rum and wincing. 

“No,” he admitted, his gaze wavering on a certain point way off the stage for a second too long to be accidental. Charlotte followed it and saw a young, dark haired woman in glasses and an unreadable sash sitting on a stool, shimmying along with the music, just as skinny as the rest of them, but much less trashy or trashed. _Ooooooh_ _._

“Hey, you should hit the mike. I know just the song to get that phone ringing.” 

* * *

Emma watched Alice’s friends go through what felt like the twentieth rendition of _Man, I feel like a woman_ (it couldn’t have been. Maybe two was the new twenty when it came to that song). She clapped and cheered along with the rest of sash-clad gang, but her heart wasn’t into it. Henry was tending bar, and he’d put _Peacock’s Fancy_ on the actual menu, and she could not even bring herself to order it. Everybody else had, judging by the brown, green and blue layers in their glasses, and there she was with the same glass of Sauvignon Blanc she’s nursed all evening out of fear of hitting the bar again and having to find one non-pathetic subject of conversation to have in a packed club with booming retro music. 

Aside from her social failures, her mind was on Jimmy, on his recovery from ethylic and UV irradiation overdose, only to be left in bed in a profound fever stupor. _Nothing out of the ordinary under the circumstances_ , had said the staff doctor, while both the British nurse and a bikini-clad brunette had scowled. She spared a second thought for Frank, apparently still under the same bizarre weather that had bedridden him that morning. All this was weird, unless these two douchebags had taken part some ancient Caribbean rite of passage including indigenous mushrooms, hallucinogenic herbs and a barrel of rum to explain their current butcher block status. And still, it didn’t add up. 

From deep within her thoughts, she heard Alice’s shrill voice lambasting one of her poor maids of honor, probably for some minor ridiculous slight like not wearing pink on a Wednesday; then came Byron Hale schmoozing through his announcement of the next song and singers, which drew cries worthy of Shea Stadium in ‘65. The music started, a very familiar beat she had sung to herself many times, and then the voice came. 

That was very familiar too, but then again oh so new. 

_“From the first day,_

_That I saw your smiling face,_

_Honey, I knew that we would be_

_Together forever.”_

She looked up then, only to find dark blue eyes deep set upon her. He was swaying along to the music, somewhat awkwardly in all that flopping flannel, two familiar women on each side snapping their fingers in perfect synchronicity. It was all so surreal that she completely froze, watching him sing (not badly, but even if it had been, she couldn’t have cared less) and move under the technicolor spotlights until the crescendo to the chorus hit, and he thrust his opened palm in her direction. 

_“I’ll never break your heart,_

_I’ll never make you cry,_

_I’d rather die,_

_Then live without you._

_I’ll give you all of me_

_Honey, that’s no lie”_

He looked so sheepish as the women took over the second part, that it was all she could do to push her glasses up and hide her gaping mouth in her hand, as the hydraulics of her jaw had apparently broken down around the point of _I deserve a try Honey, Just once_. _Give me a chance and I’ll prove this all wrong._ The opened hand was now over his heart, his eyes still very much upon her, and despite the constant panicked pitch of _ohmygodohmygodohmygod_ her defaulted brain emitted, there was no further denying possible that this was it, the peak moment, the apotheosis of her romantic life. 

Henry “Hot Hank” Hopkins was serenading her with a Backstreet Boys ballad. 

And the song was going to end soon and he was going to get off the stage and come up to her and kiss her in front of everyone and she would kiss him back like she’d been dying to do every minute of every day on this cursed ship and there was no way in hell it was going to be meh because it was already twenty times above any semblance of meh that it could only be foot-flipping, toe-curling, mind-blowing levels of amazing. _Ohmygodohmygodohmygod_ _._

So far in the near future was her exalted mind, watching him attack the bridge with his chorus girls, that she failed to notice someone else climb onto the stage, shove the British nurse out of the way, grab on to the loose lapels to pull Henry down and firmly plant her lips over his, to the hoots of a dozen female voices, and the wailing tone of Emma’s flatlining brain. 

The usurper turned around, a stunned Henry left behind, and threw her arms up as she squealed in victory in the mike, one hand readjusting her tiara, one eye casting a devious wink at Emma. 

_Oh you fucking bitch._

It was all too much to bear. Her perfect rom com dream shattered at her feet, Emma kept her glance firmly fixed upon it as she stood painfully, fighting the rising color in her cheeks and the bile in her throat. As she made her way to the exit, she heard the voice she now despised above all thrill in the mike. 

“Thank you Hank for this wonderful send-off, I’ll be seeing you later for an encore. I hope you have _Get Down_ in your repertoire.” 

Her crowd cheered in answer, and Alice would have probably gone on to further obliterate Emma’s remaining shards of dignity and sisterly affection if a sudden, violent spell of cough hadn't folded her over. The barked noise resounded in the speakers all around the room, as did the passionate “Bollocks. Fucknugget. Bugger.” that followed. 

Emma had to turn around then, to find Anne with her arm around her sister, the other woman with the back of her hand at her brow, and an immediate frown upon hers. 

“Party over,” she called out into the mike, being careful not to get too close to it. “Closing time. Shoot down your drinks and get your asses back to your cabin, **_now_ ** . No fucking around. This is **NOT** a drill.” 

* * *

Samuel was alone in the bridge, watching the calm, dark waters before him, when an impetuous knock resounded on the door. The ship was on autopilot, so after a quick glance at his graphs, he made his way to the door and opened it, to reveal a stunning woman with a very determined look on her face. 

“I’m looking for First Mate Samuel Diggs. It’s an emergency.” 

“That’s me,” he said with a simple shrug and a smile. “What can I help you with?” 

Her determination faltered somewhat, and he felt her eyes roam appreciatively over him, with a final bite of her lip. “Daaamn...well _you_ ’re the one good thing to come out of this evening.” 

At his perplexed expression, she sighed. “Never mind, work first.” She took out her ID. “I’m Charlotte Jenkins, Head of the Regional Disaster Response Team of the Red Cross in Haiti. I’m travelling with Dr. Phinney, whom you’ve met earlier about the need to quarantine the ship due to potential viral infection. Well, that need just went from important to immediate. And if Mr. Green fights back, tell him executive action from the CDC is imminent, and if that doesn’t scare him enough, throw in that his baby girl is the potential Patient Zero, and that he’s probably infected as well.” 

“So they were right after all, damnit,” he sighed, weighing the enormity of the task at hand, but quickly regaining his bearing. “Okay Ms. Jenkins, consider the emergency protocol initiated. I’ll brief the Captain and we’ll deal with Green. We'll reconvene here in 30 minutes. I expect Dr. Foster and Phinney are already informed?” 

Charlotte nodded vigorously. “Yeah, of course they are. 30 minutes is perfect. We’ll be there.” 

_No they’re not. And 30 minutes is_ **not** _perfect. Not with two doctors MIA on the cusp of a nautical medical emergency._

_Fan-fucking-_ _tastic_ _._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This should be it in terms of virus-y stuff. Just thought Papa Green needed a bit more incentive to cooperate. Should be mostly relatively smooth sailing under sexy quarantine from now on!
> 
> The Peacock's Fancy is a Middlemarch Family invention. It was included in her original Chapter 5 with Emma ordering it like a nerdy ninja until I asked her to please write her out because I needed her to be bitter and lonely in Chapter 6 and she very kindly obliged me. So the drink returns in all its Midori glory. Emma still has to order it, though...
> 
> Charlotte's Gryffindor, Mary's Ravenclaw, Anne's Slytherin and Emma's Hufflepuff. Feel free to debate it but that's one headcannon I'm pretty dead-set about.
> 
> Dare honored, MercuryGray. And karaoke fulfilled, Tortoiseshells ;)


	9. Lady In Red

Over the course of her walk from her cabin to the Empress Queen’s answer to Ruth Chris Steakhouse, upon reflection, Mary decided to blame it on the sun. Too much sun, that was the only remotely plausible explanation she could gin up for why, having seen her attempt to nip an infectious disease nightmare in the bud be effectively overwhelmed by a veritable river of Southern-fried horseshit, she had allowed Char to talk her into meeting Jed Foster for dinner. And then allowed Anne to give her prom hair and mock her into a pair of strappy sandals. The dress was okay, floaty instead of tight with a hi-lo hemline that made it manageable on stairs and despite seething. It was holding up quite well in the seething department.

“You don’t want to go in there,” Jed Foster said. He was wearing a tuxedo as promised (threatened?) but at least without a stupid red rosebud boutonniere. She hadn’t thought she could be more enraged with him but he had once again proven her wrong, bossing her around in literally the first words he’d uttered. Earlier, she’d been astonished enough at how he’d undercut her with Summers and Green that she’d talked to him as if he’d behaved reasonably, but with the time spent under Anne’s brutal hairbrush and the walk over to the restaurant on an absolutely beautiful night, she’d had a chance to reconsider. Jed Foster was a special kind of asshole, the kind that thought he could get away with it.

“What. Do. You. Mean?”

“I got here a little early and it was already packed. You really couldn’t design a more ideal setting for exponential viral spread if you tried, which of course you wouldn’t, I mean the rhetorical you,” he said. “Even if it turns out to be a toxin or contaminant, it’s completely cheek by jowl and it’s a steakhouse, there’s a lot of jowl.”

“Fine. Have a good evening,” Mary said, feeling the urge to stalk back to her cabin start at the top of her spine and electrify every nerve involved in stalking. If her heels sounded like a pair of furious maracas and the lo part of the red chiffon hem flapped dramatically like a cape, so be it.

“Wait, please—I tried to fix it, I have a Plan B,” he said quickly. Mary transmuted her imminent stalking off into crossed arms and narrowed her eyes for good measure. He’d said please. That bought him about ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven…

“I took the liberty of ordering dinner for take-out and I got us a table on the Baronin Deck—Sam said it would be basically deserted this time of night, so no interruptions, no additional contagion risk,” he said.

“You ordered my dinner? What year is this? Who the hell do you think you are?” 

“A fuck-up, generally. Pardon my French. But I have expensive taste and I thought you’d like to screw over Colonel Sanders Green, so I ordered the Kobe strip steak and the Wagyu tenderloin,” he said.

“And what if I don’t want to only eat steak for dinner?” Mary snapped.

“I ordered sides. All the sides. Creamed spinach, onion rings, goose-fat potatoes, the black truffle fries, mac and cheese, a shrimp cocktail… the hostess looked like she was going to throw up. And I got the 2011 Harlan Estate Cab but that’s all you. You know I don’t drink,” he said. 

“You think I’m going to drink an entire bottle of Cabernet by myself? And then what? End up in your bed? After what happened today?” Mary said, her voice getting dangerously near a hiss. Jed picked up on and took a step back, waving his hands in a universal gesture of _I mean you no harm_.

“I thought you could have a nice glass of extremely costly wine with your dinner while we tried to strategize and then you could bring the bottle home with you. Your friends, Char and Anne, they seemed like they might finish off the bottle with you. Or you could pour it overboard and waste 1K of James Green’s money. Your call,” he said. He had the good sense not to make any comment about her ending up in his bed or not.

“It’s terrible to waste good wine, though that’s tempting,” Mary said. She was maybe 1% mollified.

“And here’s the food,” Jed said, taking two huge bags from a waitress who was notably wearing gloves. “I had them send the wine ahead, uncorked. Let it breathe a little.”

“You’re not off my shit list yet,” Mary warned.

“But I’m further down on the differential, right?” he asked, risking a smile. It was a genuine, appealing smile and his dark eyes were bright and now she could smell onion rings so she nodded. They walked the distance to the solitary table he’d arranged, glass hurricanes around ivory tapers, big enough for four people so perfect for the two of them and the gigantic amount of food he’d ordered. He poured out a glass of wine, a generous measure.

“Taste the wine first—if you don’t like this one, I can text Sam and he’ll get us the Bryant Family Estate Cab, maybe one that’s not from Napa. Or a martini for you,” Jed said.

“First?”

“Before we get into it,” he replied, opening the take-out boxes and setting the Kobe strip in front of her. The side dishes were arrayed like a sunflower’s petals. She sipped the wine. It was exquisite, like the candles and the starlight on the ocean. 

“It’s good,” she said. “So, why the hell did you shut me down with Green? You made me seem like a woo-woo moron, prancing in and demanding he take a huge financial loss without any real justification besides the letters after my name when I spent hours assembling all the recent CDC and WHO updates plus those articles from JAMA and The Lancet and stats. So many stats. I’m supposed to be on vacation and I made a fucking Powerpoint for him so he could understand the risk, spread, containment, all of it. I could have convinced that jackass if you hadn’t cut me off and every hour counts in one of these situations.”

“I screwed up. I thought, we had Sam on our side already, and I could tell Captain Summers was going to go along with us…we could introduce your recommendations to Green a little more slowly, he’d take it better—I thought I recognized what type of country club asshole he was and I was wrong,” Jed said.

“You thought you knew better,” Mary said. “You thought you knew better about how to explain the proper management of an outbreak than someone who has spent years, like a decade, actually studying it and doing it. In places more complicated than a second-rate cruise ship. And then you thought, cherry on top, I’ll ask the girl out on a date. _That’ll_ make it up to her.”

“Yeah. You’d think I’d start to figure out I should get over myself. I mean, I’m here and not working as a real doctor,” he said but not morosely. He wisely didn’t point out that in a moment of weakness, she’d agreed to the stupid dinner date. It was marginally less stupid than she’d anticipated and he’d shoved the entire shrimp cocktail over to her as soon as he saw her glance linger on it for a millisecond.

“You’re about to be a plenty real doctor. If we’re lucky, it’ll be a matter of getting them quarantined and then keeping it that way but you already have a patient in sick-bay and it sounds like his friend might also be a problem,” Mary said. 

“Just so you know, I didn’t spend the rest of the day lounging around and getting ready for tonight. I inventoried the sick-bay, I have an Excel spreadsheet for you, and I took a stab at establishing quarantine zones using the ship’s schematics, but you definitely need to look those over, I may be off…and I did a little research about the next ports, what supplies we might try to get. We’re pretty good on gloves, not impressive on masks,” he said.

“Oh, so you’re telling me you did your job?” Mary said. “And that it doesn’t take you four hours to put on a tuxedo? Maybe I should give you a gold star?”

“The Kobe’s not softening you up, huh? I didn’t think the Cab would work, but the steak…” Jed said.

“Pass me the onion rings and maybe I’ll be more inclined to forgiveness. Not forgetting,” Mary said.

“That’s fair. Tell me if I’m hogging the mac and cheese,” Jed said, shrugging off his tuxedo jacket and loosening his bow-tie, which meant it was the real deal and he’d actually tied it himself. Other than his ass (and the Excel spreadsheet), it was easily the most attracted she’d been to him though the blissful look on his face as he ate the mac and cheese was also empirically hot.  
“You’re here—where are your friends? Char and Anne?”

“Anne’s not exactly my friend. She’s Char’s friend,” Mary said. “Char’s almost certainly calling in favors from people she doesn’t think I want to know about to get us prepped.”

“Behind your back?”

“Officially. She thinks I’m a straight arrow, which compared to her I am. She probably thought this dinner was an ideal way to occupy me while she organizes everything without worrying that much about how,” Mary said. “You’ve heard of Machiavelli? He’s got nothing on Charlotte Jenkins.”

“And Anne?”

“I don’t know what the hell she’s doing—she said karaoke but who knows with her. I mean, she’s the same woman who threw potato skins and her Spanx at Byron Hale. And she did my hair like I was going to a school dance,” Mary said. She’d also made a number, a high number, of increasingly vulgar comments about what Mary should do with and to her dinner companion, with pointers that would have made Dr. Ruth blanch.

“She’s scary,” Jed said, topping up her wine-glass. “For the record, I was a wuss before and didn’t want to risk you giving me the laser eyes until I was burnt to a crisp, but if you showed up to Prom looking the way you do, you’d definitely be the Prom Queen.”

“Thanks,” Mary laughed. “That’s what every thirty year old doctor is hoping to hear.”

“Hey, I’m rusty. A shitty divorce and then going to rehab, it’s not great for your game,” Jed said. He was telling her a lot and they both knew it. She wasn’t going to his cabin tonight and she wasn’t inviting him home with her but it wasn’t permanently off the table…

“I don’t play games,” Mary said softly. And then shivered in the breeze off the water. Jed moved like lightning (or she’d had more Cab than she’d planned), tucking his tuxedo jacket around her bare shoulders, his hands lingering long enough for them both to notice.

“Before you ask, I’m fine. And it looks better on you,” Jed said, back in his chair before she could say boo as if saying boo was anywhere on her to-do list. The coat was warm and there was the scent of his cologne in the fabric.

“I think you better take me back to sick-bay,” she said.

“You don’t feel well?”

“No, I’m fine, but I better look at those schematics. I don’t want to see your etchings,” Mary replied.

“Okay,” he said.

“Not tonight. Maybe after all this is over,” she offered, surprising him even more than herself if his expression was anything to go by. 

“How long’s quarantine?”

“Fourteen days,” she said.

“That’s not so long,” he said, looking her straight in the eye.

“It will be, you sweet summer child,” Mary said, shaking her head and letting him see her glance at his mouth, his hands. “It will be.”

* * *

“That’s it, that’s just right,” Char breathed, leaning over Sam. He smelled amazing and the view wasn’t bad either. “That’s perfect, right there.” 

She pointed to the final edit he’d made in his statement, letting her hand graze his. Hell, she’d arranged for a shipment of masks in the next port and gotten McClellan at CDC to man up and to back her up with the threat to Green. If Sam didn’t like the touch of her hand, he could jerk away. He stayed still but the look he gave her was lively, amused and intrigued. Char smiled broadly, wickedly, showing her teeth. Maybe there was a God after all and damn, if She didn’t do some fine work with Samuel Diggs.

“This is acting Captain Diggs, letting you know that we have entered into a state of quarantine. You are to shelter-in-place in the nearest safe location with a maximum of four other people. The medical staff will be updating us within the hour. Again, we have entered into a state of emergency quarantine, expected duration fourteen days. Please, remain where you are.”

* * *

“…Please, remain where you are.” 

Samuel Diggs had a voice made for a captain, a resonant bass full of an effortless, confident command. Emma leaned back against the door to Alice’s bridal suite, everything ivory and rose, the bed’s headboard a luxe dahlia velvet, the scalloped sconces glowing, shedding a soft, honeyed light over the silk duvet, the polished mahogany floors… over Henry Hopkins’s broad, plaid-flannelled shoulders, his shocked face, his blue eyes wide. Emma’s phone buzzed like a murder hornet, her mother blowing it up with texts Emma was not about to read, since she was locked in her sister’s bridal suite in a search for incriminating evidence on her ex-boyfriend with the ship’s chaplain staring at her like she was either Mr. Rochester’s first wife or Princess Buttercup, a faint trace of Alice’s sparkly lipgloss gleaming away on his lips like a taunt. Emma knocked her head lightly against the door; she was quarantined in a room with the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen, who’d recently serenaded her before her engaged sister made a pass at him, they might both have been infected with some to-be-determined illness or exposed to some random substance like the sex pollen that was an unnecessary justification for every time Captain Kirk hooked up with an alien. And there was only one bed. (There was also only one custom-installed heart-shaped Jacuzzi in the bathroom, but he’d find that out soon enough--)

“Jesus fucking Christ.” She clapped her hand over her mouth, feeling the blush bloom on her cheeks and spread down her neck, murmured “I’m so sorry.”

“Under the circumstances, I’m sure He’d understand where you’re coming from,” Henry said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the spot next to him, like that was a good idea.  
Emma started laughing. She laughed until tears came into her eyes and he spoke.

“Emma, are you okay?”

* * *

Silas squealed most plaintively, his piggy eyes regarding her with dismay.

“It’s all right, my love. Fourteen days. It’s just enough time for us make you a YouTube sensation! And I’ve got some ideas about that TikTok thing the youngsters on board are always yammering about too,” Bridget said. While Silas was occupied, she’d get to the bottom of the financials on this ship…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia), including the former subspecies known as the Japanese giant hornet (V. m. japonica),colloquially known as the yak-killer hornet and "murder hornet" is the world's largest hornet, native to temperate and tropical East Asia, South Asia, Mainland Southeast Asia and parts of the Russian Far East. They prefer to live in low mountains and forests, while almost completely avoiding plains and high-altitude climates. Vespa mandarinia creates nests by digging, co-opting pre-existing tunnels dug by rodents, or occupying spaces near rotted pine roots. The hornet has a body length of 45 mm (1.8 in), a wingspan around 75 mm (3.0 in), and a stinger 6 mm (0.24 in) long, which injects a large amount of potent venom.
> 
> Ruth Westheimer (born June 4, 1928), better known as Dr. Ruth, is a German American sex therapist, media personality, author, radio, television talk show host, and Holocaust survivor. Her media career began in 1980 with the radio show Sexually Speaking, which continued until 1990. She has hosted several series on the Lifetime Channel and other cable television networks from 1984 to 1993 and is the author of 45 books on sex and sexuality.
> 
> Ruth's Chris Steak House is a chain of over 100 steakhouses across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
> 
> JAMA is The Journal of the Americal Medical Association.


	10. QUARANTINE - DAY 1

Jane Green cracked her door open, cast a quick glance into the corridor and, finding it empty, snuck out. It was an odd feeling, being a middle-aged woman, the co-owner of this ship, and having to creep around these hallways like a thief in the night, or a teenager past curfew. She was one, in a way. The voice that has resonated in the intercom, sending them all to their rooms like a stern parent, was not that of their captain, and she had to understand just how that'd come to be, exactly. 

It was a road oft-travelled at night and she covered it briskly, entering the crew’s quarters. There as well, there were few souls out, and the odd steward she crossed did not dare to question her motives for being there. Finally, she reached the door she sought, and rapped her knuckles quickly on the faux-wood metal. 

“Who is it?” came the voice from inside. 

“It’s me, Alfred. Open up.” 

There were some footsteps, the creak of the deadbolt, and the door was opened... only to stay ajar from the chain-lock. Jane chuckled. “Oh, what’s this, now? Playing hide and seek?” 

Summers’ eye appeared into the slit. “You’re not supposed to be here, Jane. There’s a quarantine on board.” 

She crossed her arms. “That’s precisely why I am here. Pray tell: _why_ is there a quarantine on board? James was adamant against it. You’re the captain. Call it off.” 

“No.” 

“No?” Jane repeated, dumbstruck. “What do you mean, no? This is your ship. Our ship. Get it back from your grubby First Mate’s dirty hands.” 

He shook his head forcefully. “It’s the contagion’s ship, now, apparently. Drs. Phinney and Foster, they explained it all, very, very well; they had graphs, with _colors_ , scary looking ones, all reds and darker reds and blacks, like some devil pirate accountant work. I hate accountants even more than I hate pirates. I told Mr. Green all of that, but he wouldn’t listen: where is now, anyway?” 

“He went to bed early; that announcement gave him a dreadful migraine. He’ll be in top shape to fight it tomorrow.” 

“No, he won’t!” Summers cried. “Don’t you see? He has it too! We're all cursed! So if Diggs wants to steer this doomed ship straight to a sea burial, good on him, I promote him. He’s the Captain now.” 

“You’re not afraid of a little virus, are you?” she scoffed. “We’ve been through dozens of those. You’re tougher than that.” 

“None like this. This one could be serious. And I’m not tough: I’m an old man, I’m vulnerable, so I’m staying right here, as we all should. Please, Jane, dear, go back to your room. Stay in. Stay safe.” 

He moved to close the door, but she slapped her palm against it, and leaned her head over it to stare the Captain intently in the eye. 

“Come now, Alfie, take that chain off. If you won’t come out, then let me in. I’ll stay in with you for a little while. With a migraine, he’ll be out cold for half a day... Let’s talk, have a drink. You still have that fine scotch I gave you? That’ll get you to unwind, relax a little. And then, if that’s not enough, I know just the thing to take your mind off things... yes, _that_ thing you like, in the hot tub, with the little ships, and the hat..."

She saw him waver, soften, but just as quickly, return to stone. “No. Go be with your husband and kids. It’s their damn fault we’re all into this mess now.” 

“What?!” she cried. “You ungrateful fool... don’t you know everything you have is thanks to _me_?” 

“Yes, you’ve kept me very well aware of it, all these years, but there’s finally one thing I _definitely_ don’t care to get from you, so you might as well take the rest back. **I** **retire.** Effective immediately. Good-bye, Mrs. Green. Say hi to Davy Jones and the IRS for me.” 

And with this, the door was shut, leaving a very stunned, and increasingly very worried, Jane Green on its step. 

* * *

“Emma, are you okay?” 

She very obviously wasn’t, but he had to ask, had to do something more than stare at her flabbergasted from the bed; she who was always so calm, so collected, a serious frown over the rims of her glasses, who was now gasping for air, tears streaming down her cheeks, then doubling over forward with another peal of bubbly, nervous laughter. 

“ _Quarantine!_ ” she finally cried, breathless, the punch line to the joke that had never been told. 

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why didn’t Summers make the announcement? And quarantine based on what, your sister’s cough? It must be some kind of prank.” 

It was enough to quiet her then, wheezing slightly, her head leaning back against the metallic door as she reached behind her glasses to wipe her eyes. “Didn’t you register how fast they had you whisk her off to the med bay? How stern that woman was at the mike, sending everyone back to their rooms? What part of that makes you think it was a joke?” 

Henry shrugged. “It was a bachelorette party. Either that or “cops” were about to bust in about a “complaint for disturbance”. _The double air quotes better make the situation feel as ridiculous as I feel, making double air quotes._ “They kicked me out as soon as I got her there. Maybe Foster had a special, private treat in store for her in the infirmary.” 

“Ugh, no,” she scowled. “These women weren’t kidding around, Henry. They’re the ones who took charge when Jimmy was steaming away like dim sum in the pool. The red- or blonde? Well the English one is a nurse, she told me so herself. And Foster being some kind of stripper on his downtime? Again: ugh, _no._ ” 

“Yeah, no, you’re probably right,” he sighed, leaning forward, his forearms braced upon his thighs. “The other woman was asking me questions before I san- uh... while I was tending bar, whether I’d seen anyone looking sick. They were definitely aware of something. Something serious, apparently.” 

“Goddammit.” This time, she didn’t apologize; instead, she starting pacing like a caged animal across the small stateroom, turning around when she came up to the bed. _A panther,_ he thought, admiring the long black hair that she’d uncharacteristically left loose, the short cocktail dress that was one shade of blue off of black, the sash abandoned somewhere between the bar and the room. _Or a restless horse stuck in its pen. Like Black Beauty_. Wait, what. _What am I thinking?_ _Is this weird? Yes. Very. Why am I being very weird? Why horses?!?_

“My sister, my brother,” she listed, counting them along on her fingers, interrupting his rambling thoughts. “Frank, too, apparently. I had dinner with them all just before all Hell broke loose. Spent time with Alice by the pool yesterday. _I touched the pig._ I’m as good as done for. You too.” 

“Me?!” 

Emma scoffed. “Well, she _kissed_ you, didn’t she? She smacked those shimmery, diseasey lips all over yours. Pretty surefire way to spread any bug. And then you carried her like a kicking sack of screaming, coughing potatoes across the ship. Aren’t you the least bit worried?” 

“I wasn’t, up to now,” he said. “I was more concerned about being stuck here for fourteen days, running out of clean clothes and having to wear Stringfellow’s stuff. The guy’s really short.” 

At Emma’s bewildered expression, it was his turn to chuckle. “I’m joking! Just trying to lighten the mood. Please, will you stop pacing? You’re making me dizzy.” 

“You’re feeling dizzy?” she repeated, eyeing him wearily. “That might be you getting sick.” 

“I seriously doubt that whatever this is, its incubation period is under an hour. Come.” Again, he patted the soft mattress next to him, and she stared at it as if it were made either of treacherous quicksand or bubbling lava. Crossing her arms, she firmly stood her ground. 

“I’d rather not.” 

“Seriously, Emma, I’m _not_ sick." 

“It’s not that.” 

“Then what?” he asked, palms out like a supplicant. She didn’t reply, her gaze upon the giant elephant in the room, and he could no longer not address it. “It’s the song, isn’t it? I knew it was a terrible idea... Listen, I’m sorry if it made you uncomfortable.” 

She shook her head; he was pretty sure she aimed for it to appear loose and casual, but it rather had all the cervical movement range of the 90s Batsuits. “It didn't. You were... pretty good, actually. And Alice was _thrilled_ with her serenade, that’s really all that matters.” 

“Alice?!” With a shake of its trunk, the elephant rolled its eyes. “ _Jesus_ , Emma... it wasn’t meant for _her_.” 

His calling upon a higher power, although very much in vain, finally got her to stop moving, to freeze, right there in the middle of the cabin, which, for all that it was a luxury honeymoon suite, was still much too small for comfort for two people very much _not_ on their honeymoon. He watched her hand move to tuck her hair behind her ear, touch her glasses, the tell he knew so well shouting louder than any words. She wouldn’t meet his eye, but still, he could detect something in hers; something worried, and scared, and... _hopeful?_

She knew. _Oh hell, she knew._

She knew that he knew that she knew. _Did it make sense?_ Did anything make sense in the bridal suite of a quarantined ship with a girl he was head over heels for since their first cruise together, their first team building exercise, their first very awkward employee sensitivity training session? Did it even have to? 

Maybe it didn’t have to make sense, but the elephant agreed: it could stand to be made clearer. 

If she wouldn’t sit - _on a bed. A silk-_ _duvetted_ _Wyoming King bed. Next to him._ _Of course_ _she wouldn’t._ ** _She knew._** _-_ he’d have to stand. As if moving through molasses, he rose and walked up to her, a matter of three steps; she took one back, her back hitting the wall and preventing any further retreat. Taking a last, deep breath, he plunged, tackling that elephant with all the might of an offensive linesman. 

“I sang that song to _you_ , Emma Green. Only you. I meant it when I said I'd rather die than live without you. And as we’re apparently maybe much closer to dying than originally planned, well... nothing could make me happier than spending my remaining days on Earth quarantined here with you.” 

He saw her hesitate, recoil, her wide gaze squirm away from the intensity of his, and his confidence crashed. _Oh no. Too much too soon, you massive idiot. OH NO. I blew it. OOOOOH NOOOO. Abort, abort!_

“On-only if it’s okay with you, of course,” he stammered to counter. “It’s totally okay with me if it’s not okay with you. We still have plenty of time to sneak back into our own rooms and forget all about what I just said. This conversation never happened. Well, this monologue really, you never said anything. And you’re still not saying anything, and I’m not shutting up. This is... not okay. I should go.” 

“No.” Emma spoke then, quickly, quietly. “It’s okay with me. It's totally more than okay.” 

Through lashes so unbelievably long, she lifted her eyes to his then, a silent invitation in their dark blue depth: it was the most wonderful sight in the whole world. _Ooooooh_ _it’s happening. Don’t mess this up, don’t mess this up!_ Swallowing down his fear, he closed what little gap remained between them. “Is this okay?” he asked. 

She nodded, and he reached forward to take her hand, interlacing his fingers through hers; it was the most wonderful touch in the whole world. “Is this?” he checked again, and again, she nodded, to his absolute jubilation. 

His confidence returned and reaching new soaring heights, he brought his free hand up to her face, his fingertips gently tracing her jawline, his thumb grazing her cheek; it made her draw a sharp intake of breath, and it was the most wonderful sound in the whole world. _Am_ I _doing this? To her? How is that even possible?_ “Is thi-” 

“For God’s sake, Henry," she exhaled before reaching up to press her lips impatiently to his. 

She tasted of tropical fruit and alcohol from her Sauvignon Blanc; she smelled of coconut and aloe. And the push of her beautiful body completely against his... All his senses immediately agreed: _this_ was the most wonderful feeling in the whole world. 

He returned the kiss eagerly, and soon, more than eagerly. He could not get close enough to her: his fingers in her hair, one hand clutching the back of her hip to his. Her palms were pressed against his chest, before sliding up to push the flannel shirt off his shoulders, which he shrugged off as if on fire, hating to break contact for even a second as he freed his arms. But when he felt her hands glide down to make their way to his waist, tugging to untuck his t-shirt, it was too much. The Point of No Return. Brusquely, he pulled away. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “We can’t- let’s not go too fast, okay?” 

Her already flushed face grew even redder, her slightly bruised lips parting in surprise. “Oh, okay. Right. Sure. I’m... sorry?“ All of a sudden, realization appeared to dawn on her and she gasped. “Oh, God! You’re a _chaplain_. I'm sorry! This is probably not... sanctified stuff. God-wise.” 

He shook his head vehemently. “Oh, no, no... not _that_. Noooo. I, uh... kinda... got ordained online. For the salary, mostly; it’s slightly less miserable than just bartending. But yeah... really high level, non-denominational stuff. Definitely no rule books. Or chastity pledges.” 

At her confused yet relieved expression, it was his turn to blush. “In hindsight, maybe not my brightest moment, considering you code-ordered a “Peacock’s Fancy at the Bridal Suite”, but... I never imagined in a million years that it would lead to this. That we might actually.... _do_ this. Here. Tonight.” _Come on man, what are you, fifteen?!_ “I don't have protection,” he finally blurted out miserably. 

For the first time since her earlier hysterics, a slight smile appeared on Emma's irresistible lips. “Henry...” she soothingly drawled, and he almost melted at the way she spoke his name. “This is _The Bridal Suite_. I don’t expect you’d have read the very classy brochure on Alexandria Line’s ever classier Honeymoon Package?” 

He shook his head sheepishly and she seemed to struggle to keep a straight face as she continued, her finger tracing the Nirvana logo over his chest. “Well, as a welcome gift, along with his and hers bathrobes for the jacuzzi and a minibar fully stocked with all the best prestige liqueurs, you see that large black gift-wrapped box on the nightstand? With the giant pink bow? It what’s called a Lewd Bag.” 

“A loot bag?” he repeated, glancing over his shoulder quickly at the object in question, both hoping and dreading the answer. 

“No, you heard that right. _Lewd_ Bag. Even though it’s a box. I know. Well...” she closed her eyes with barely restrained amusement and embarrassment and shook her head, “I can’t believe I’m gonna say this. To you. Here. Tonight... Oh fuck it, we’re not fifteen,” she exhaled. “It contains seven different kinds of premium condoms, nine of each kind - some lame play on Seventh Heaven and Cloud Nine. And other... intimate... items.” 

The way she half-cringed as she bit her lower lip and looked at him expectantly made him swallow. “Seven, huh? Times _nine_? ….and other... items. Wow... so we’re out of excuses for a bit, then?” 

She shrugged, still failing as adorably as earlier in conveying disinterested nonchalance. “I’d say so, but if you'd rather we take it slow anyway, leave it where we found it, that’s... cool. I'm totally okay with that.” Her eyes drilling into his did not seem to agree. Neither did her fingers hovering at his belt. And most definitely, neither did any inch of him. 

“Oh fuck _that_.” He tore off his shirt, his mouth seeking hers hungrily once more. 

“Thank God,” she muttered between kisses, the sexiest sound imaginable. His hands were on her back, on her butt, and with one fluid motion, he lifted her up, pining her against the wall. She gasped, but her legs wrapped tightly around hist waist, the skirt of her dress hiking up to reveal to his hands’ delight the soft firmness of her thighs. Her own hands were clasped on his neck, her fingernails grazing its nape and driving him half-mad from the slight pain. 

“I apologize in advance, this is probably not gonna last as long as I wish. You’re just so... everything.” His mouth moved to her throat, to the racing pulse beneath it. “Hell, I can’t even think of a proper word. You’re _everything._ ” 

“Keep this up and I won’t do any better. And I don’t care. We have fourteen days to make it up.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I chickened out when things were getting "interesting".... smut 10, sagiow 0.


	11. QUARANTINE - DAY 2

Under what little light from the rising sun managed to peek through the porthole and the unbelievably smug face of Byron Hale as he reclined comfortably in a bundle of bedsheets, Anne Hastings impatiently hunted for her various pieces of clothing strewn across the small cabin. 

“What’s the hurry?” Byron purred. “The early bird 2-for-1 mimosa special doesn’t apply anymore at the breakfast bar, with all this quarantine bullshit. Come back to bed. I might have another kind of special in mind...” 

“I can’t,” she said, finally finding her shorts behind the lamp and putting them on. “I'm due to replace Foster in the med bay in twelve minutes, and I need to shower and change back at my place. He might not be so eager to volunteer for night shifts again if I keep showing up late.” 

“Again, what’s the hurry? All the sick people are probably still asleep and not to mention, fairly able. Bit a fever, bit of cough; it’s not like you need to spoon-feed them Jell-O and juggle bedpans." 

She retrieved her shirt from atop the TV and proceeded to untangle it from the balled-up mess it had somehow become. “A deal’s a deal, Byron. I’ll never hear the end of it from both him and Countess CDC if I bungle this. And then she’ll rile up Charlotte... These two can be royal pains in the arse if they set their minds to it. You’d do best to stay on their good side.” 

“Duly noted. So, see you later then? After your shift? I’ll score us a nice bottle of something and maybe can even sweet talk B Gibson into whipping us up some tasty take-out? What’re you craving?” 

He stared eagerly at her, his pale eyes alight, and it was all she could do to hide her cringing as she pulled her shirt over her head. Smoothing the fabric into place, her bedraggled blonde locks afterwards, she looked at him hesitantly, yet resolutely. “Listen, Byron-” 

“Oh, you gotta be kidding me!” he cried, sitting up straight. “You’re blowing me off, aren’t you? Why? Aren’t we having fun?” 

“Yes, but under the circumstances, I think we need to put fun on hold.” 

“Why?” 

She crossed her arms, her annoyance rising at the repeated inquiry. “Not sure where your head’s been these last two days _–_ never mind, don’t answer that!- but there’s a bloody _quarantine_ on board, Byron. I’m not supposed to be here. Especially as I’m spending my days in direct contact with potentially highly contagious patients.” 

“Pfft, that doesn’t scare me. You are well worth the risk, darlin’.” 

If fear of disease would not work, maybe fear of financial failure would... “Well what about your job, then? Isn’t it against the rules for crew members to hook up with guests?” 

“Yeah, totally. I’ve fired some of my staff for much less than this.” 

“Y-your what?” she stammered. 

“My staff.” Although she would not have thought it possible, the smugness of his smile increased. Exponentially. He’d clearly had the benefits of American cosmetic dentistry; his teeth matched the porcelain in the john. “I’m the Chief Security Officer on this ship.” 

Her mouth dropped open. “Y-you’re _what_?” 

“Yeah, Security. Top Gun. Head Honcho. Yours truly. I got twenty guards reporting to me. You didn't think the lounge act was a full-time gig, did you? It’s just a fun nighttime hobby, after spending days watching camera footage, orchestrating drug and booze busts and holding hoodlums in the brig. Keeps morale and creativity flowing.” 

“Then... what the blazes are you doing _here now?_! And on the pool deck with the churros yesterday? Who’s doing your job?” 

“Relax, you’re not the only one with nightshift buddies.” He stretched back languorously. “Diggs got my back. He mans the control room when I have my swinging _soirées_ or want to spend a delicious moment with a lovely companion, and I man the bridge when he wants to show off his sweet moves during the afternoon’s salsa lessons. The guy’s almost smoother than me. Almost.” 

“I can’t believe this,” she sighed in horror. “Is anyone on this wretched raft taking anything seriously?” 

“Oh, totes seriously! Watch this.” From the nightstand drawer, he pulled out what looked like a futuristic walkie-talkie, if futuristic had been defined in the 90s. He turned it on, to much static, and selected the proper channel. 

“Eagle, this is Chief. Eagle, come in.” He winked at Anne as the feedback buzzed. 

A deep voice shortly responded. “Chief, this is Eagle, copy.” 

“Roger, Eagle. What’s our situation on this fine morning?” 

“Under control, mostly. Some stolen balls and pins at the bowling alley, a very ill-advised personal use of a pool cue in the billiard bar, and a bunch of Karens asking to see the manager at the Wellness Center. Typical Tuesday.” 

“Copy that, Eagle. Have you got a visual on Raven?” 

“Still in the Med Bay, looking to be in serious need of a drink, sleep and/or both. Hang on, let me establish contact.” 

“Nononono,” Anne muttered. 

“Raven, this is Eagle. Raven, do you copy?” 

There was a beep, followed by another burst of static. “Eagle, this is Raven,” came Jed Foster’s weary voice. “Please tell me you see that English nurse trotting along speedily my way on one of your screens. Otherwise, I’m going to strangle one of these jackasses in the next half hour.” 

“Sorry, that’s a negative, Raven.” 

“Shit. And what about Dr. Phinney, then?” 

He was interrupted by a cheerful female voice. “Eagle, this is Falcon. Eagle, come in.” 

“Copy that, Falcon. This is Eagle. We have Raven and Chief on the line.” 

“Morning, boys. Ready for Day 2 of Operation Seahawk?” 

“Yes, Ma’am.” 

“Excellent. We’ll need fresh troops to man the decks and common areas, break apart any unsanctioned gathering. Double check every locked room, we might be having a case of hijacked keycards, better be safe and reset them all.” 

“Copy that. I just checked in with the kitchens, the stewards will start with breakfast distribution shortly. And IT’s trying to do something about the sketchy WiFi, it’s not designed to have that many people assailing the firewalls at once.” 

“Falcon, any news from Dr. Phinney?” Foster pleaded. 

“Hmm, she stepped out earlier than her typical ghastly early to make some phone calls. Eagle, can you try and reach her?” 

“10-4, Falcon.” 

There was a ringing on the line. “Hello, this is Mary Phinney.” 

“Noooooo, girl, you gotta use your code name.” 

“Like hell I do, Char.” 

_“Falcon._ Come on, we’re all doing it! Show some team spirit! Operation Seahawk!” 

“I’m not using that code name. Not after what you did last time.” 

“You can’t switch your birth place, _ergo,_ you can’t switch your code name. Go.” 

“Ugh, God this is so stupid, and unprofessional...” There was a resigned sigh. “Eagle, this is Patriot-” 

“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” 

“Oh, come on, you guys! I asked you not to do that!” 

“That’s what you get for being from Patriot Nation and having a cheating, ball-deflating team.” 

“Every single time? You’re going to boo me every single time? All of you?” 

“If you keep getting angry about it, yes, most definitely. That’s the fun part.” 

“Team spirit, huh? I want a trade,” Mary declared. Anne was most surprised Mary was playing along at all and hadn’t demanded to be called Dr. Phinney. Anne also happened to know, based on a lengthy critique of B Gibson’s muffaletta, that Mary had lived in New Orleans for a few years as a military brat and could thus have justifiably claimed the name Saint, but she didn’t feel compelled to speak up. If Mary wasn’t going to advocate for herself, that was on her. 

“Your mom’s from Miami, right? You can have Dolphin.” That was Jed and Anne made note of it for later—Mary must have been sharing a lot with the ship’s doctor. Maybe more than she’d been sharing with Byron, who took the opportunity to chirp in an impressive imitation of any dolphin in any SeaWorld show. Anne reminded herself that it was just a fling. A fling that might have been permanently flung. At least if he kept on chirping. 

This was met by considerable tittering from the lines. “I don’t want _Dolphin,”_ was spat in reply. 

“Why not? Fits your graceful Disney Princess vibe.” Tittering was superseded by sniggering. Mary’s sigh became a huff. 

“FINE. I'm going to keep Patriot and just ignore your crap.” 

“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.” Jed’s baritone was noticeably softer and Anne nodded. Smart. 

“Totally fine. Now, you seagulls want a CDC update or not?” 

“Sea _hawks_. And yes, please, _Patriot_ , we most definitely do.” 

“We should be receiving test kits by helicopter in the next 24-48 hours. We’ll have to rush sampling and they’ve assured me that they’ll run the PCR as soon as they’re back in DC. Within a day from that, we should know what we’re dealing with, if it’s a known contaminant.” 

“And if it’s unknown?” 

“Then better get comfortable, cancel all your plans in the foreseeable future, and pray that someone fixes the shitty WiFi.” 

There was silence then. “I’m sure it won’t come to that. It has to be something the CDC knows. It's not like we have any passengers onboard from remote Pacific islands or Darkest Peru." 

“A Paddington reference?” Byron muttered offline. “Damn, he _is_ smoother than me...” 

_Well, that's my cue_ , Anne thought, eyebrows raised in consternation. “I’m off then, ta,” she mouthed silently as she pointed to the door, finally locating her second shoe, inexplicably, in the bathroom sink, the chunky heel caked in Byron’s toothpaste. 

Byron gave her the thumbs up and pressed the walkie-talkie's button. “Raven, Anne’s on her way, just hold tight. Eagle, you should have a visual on her in about ten seconds. Officers’ quarters.” 

Her hand froze on the doorknob as a chorus of exclamations resounded. "Anne? Just Anne? Why does _she_ get to skimp out on code names?” 

“She’s British, they have the wrong kind of football. Arsenal or Chelsea just don’t have the right ring. But goooood morning, babe! All powered up to face the day, you lucky girl?” 

“She was with you all along, Chief?! I pulled a double and she’s lounging in with your sleazy ass?” 

“Chief, you know I don’t think your ass is sleazy, but Raven’s got a point. Enough hogging the R&R, we need backup.” 

“10-4, loud and clear, man. Milady and I are on our way. Who wants coffee?” 

_I want something so much stronger than coffee and it’s only seven AM,_ she thought, not waiting for the others’ answers as she pushed the door opened with her head held high and a regal wave to the unblinking eyes of the very many, now completely un-seeable, security cameras that bore witness to her Walk of Shame, or what would have been one if Shame had been a part of Anne Hastings’s vocabulary. As it wasn’t , it was just an early morning walk on a deserted, quarantined second-rate cruise ship. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought _All serene_. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back! Collab chapter! Draft by sagiow, final edit by middlemarch. After almost a full 40 days quarantine on land, we're babystepping back into this fun wreck.  
> This implies Byron Hale is from Kansas City. Debate, discuss.


	12. QUARANTINE DAY 3

“You’re not used to working this hard, are you? You look terrible,” Mary said, taking in Jed’s rumpled scrubs, tousled hair and the shadows beneath his eyes. He gave her a look she could tell was supposed to be a glare. It just made him look more tired.

“No, tell me what you really think,” he said. “Don’t hold back.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. And I knew you’d look terrible, so I brought you this,” she replied, offering him the travel mug. Her favorite travel mug, truth be told, which she didn’t intend to tell him.

“If I drink coffee now, I won’t be able to sleep and I’m back on at 4,” he said. “But thanks.”

“That’s why it’s a honey chamomile tea latte,” Mary said. “My residency program wasn’t very good about observing the work-hour regs, so I have a few tricks for optimizing sleep. Take it, you’ll feel better. Then you can give me sign-out and hightail it off to bed.” It was a mark of how exhausted he was that he didn’t say anything at all about the state of his bed and the various ways he wished it to be otherwise occupied. There was not the slightest eyebrow waggle.

“Oh. Thank you,” he said, taking it from her very carefully, making sure not to touch her bare hand with his, then unscrewing the cap to take a long swallow. “Mm, it’s good. You weren’t lying.”

“It’s generally easier telling the truth,” she said. “Less to keep track of.” He drank again, this time holding her gaze over the rim of the mug. Was that tenderness in his expression? She glanced away and then back. And then she smiled. “You have something, a little milk foam, just there,” she said, gesturing at his upper lip, just below his beard. He flushed and dragged his other hand across his mouth quickly.

“Oh, sorry. Excuse me,” he mumbled. 

“It’s all right. I guess it was a long night—they kept you busy?”

“Not Jimmy. He’s basically a lump, satting low 90s, fever around 99. Alice seems to think this is the Radisson and that if she asks enough times, I’ll, and I quote, ‘finally give her the good stuff.’ Squivers is… Squivers. It’s Frank who’s sketchy. Guy feels like a bomb about to go off,” Jed said.

“His vitals are that bad? We need to get him airlifted out?” Mary asked.

“No, it’s just, I have a bad feeling about him,” Jed said. Mary nodded. Whatever the heck had gone on that landed Jed on the ship, it had become rapidly apparent to her he was an excellent physician, quick, creative and had a sixth sense about when one of their patients was going to vomit which had stood their shoe covers in extremely helpful stead.

“I kind of think Frank engendered that reaction in many, many people well before getting sick. Maybe it’s just his personality, shining through. If shittiness can shine through,” Mary said.

“I’m so wiped it’s starting to sound like you’re going to sing a musical number, ‘Whatever he may do/The shittiness will shine, shine, shine on through…” Jed said, improvising a melody along with the lyrics. Turned out, he had a very appealing voice, even rough from the sleepless night. 

“You’re getting a little loopy. There’s no Broadway ballad on the docket but thanks for the glimpse into your psyche,” Mary said, laughing a little. “I’ll keep a close eye on him. I’ll read your notes for the rest of the sign-up. You’re asleep on your feet.”

“Yeah. Okay. Thanks again for the tea,” Jed said. “I’ll bring the mug back at 4—I know it’s your favorite.”

“Oh,” Mary said. And then, because he’d noticed the mug and he’d been so careful not to touch her and she liked the look in his drowsy, dark eyes, she spoke again.

“Sweet dreams, Jed.”

“They will be now,” he replied, very softly.

* * *

“I know this is hard work, but it’s terribly important! I promise, I’ll have a snack for you if you’ll just cooperate,” Bridget crooned to Silas, tugging the bandana mask into place. Again. The pig gave her the side-eye a fourteen year old girl would be proud of and tapped a back hoof.

“That’s it, just like that. You’re already a ship-wide sensation, it’s time to go global,” Bridget said, angling the camera and adding another filter. “Besides, if those Green buffoons think I’m occupied making you a TikTok star, they won’t expect me to take them down. Though the state of their books makes you wonder, how have they lasted this long? I’m really going to have to leverage the hell out of the holdings to make this worthwhile financially. Of course, it’s definitely worthwhile philosophically, after all they’ve done—never met a Ponzi scheme they could refuse, never met one they couldn’t fuck up, pardon my French.”

Silas squealed merrily. He always liked it when she talked about the Greens’ imminent comeuppance. He was a very intelligent creature.

* * *

_“Working hard or hardly working, am I right?” Percival Squivers said as he pulled a multicolored silk handkerchief from his sleeve, thereby knocking his iPhone off its perch. Again._

_“Shit, I’m never going to get this show taped, it’s terrible,” he muttered. To himself because he’d been alone in the smaller lounge when lockdown happened and now his bubble was him, the rabbit puppet in his top-hat and the sea-monkeys his mother had given him for his birthday which he’d brought to life because what was he waiting for? Meals were left outside the door, which kept him safe but eliminated any chance of a chat with a waiter._

_“Let’s take it from the top,” he said to himself. He’d started the magic webisodes as a way to keep from going bananas but now his perfectionism and lack of a technical assistant were getting him down. It was all he could do not to abandon the project and just play Candy Crush until his eyes bugged out. As more than one commenter had pointed out online, his eyes bulged froggily to begin with, so it wasn’t that big a hurdle. However, that nice brunette lady doctor had told him to soldier on, because he was essential to the morale of the quarantined passengers. Essential, she’d said, which was basically the biggest compliment he’d ever gotten, so he limited his gaming, made sure to order protein rich salads to keep up his strength, and dedicated himself, anew, to his craft._

_“Welcome back to Shipboard Magic and Origami, with your host, Percival “PS I Love You” Squivers! Today’s episode will astound you—and teach you how to fold bird-of-paradise napkins!”_

“Squivers is still delirious, Phinney,” Anne remarked. “But his show is better. I’d almost watch the bloody thing now.”

* * *

“I could get used to this,” Henry murmured against Emma’s bare shoulder. There was a perfectly good razor and vetiver-jasmine shaving gel set in the bathroom, but he hadn’t availed himself of it after Emma’s first gasp at the touch of his beard and now he looked like a pirate and it felt perfectly delicious. He nuzzled her lightly enough to tickle.

“You’re terrible!” she laughed, rolling over to get a better view. He only had good, better and best views and she had a very brief flicker of guilt over how wonderful she felt in comparison to how her sister must be doing in sickbay. Henry smiled and the flicker went right out.

“Oh really? I’ll have to work harder to get back in your good graces,” he said.

“Maybe after breakfast,” Emma said, scooting around in the mussed bed linens. Henry’s tee-shirt still fell off her shoulder and there was a decent chance he’d insist on an amuse-bouche of his own before pancakes arrived. She kept telling herself she needed to focus on the case, on assembling the evidence against Frank, but Henry was most distracting. Even more so when he offered to help and put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses—after that the afternoon, evening and night had been most deliciously… derailed.

“After breakfast, I should probably try to write a sermon,” he said. She gave him a look. “After lunch then. I have to look after my whole flock, you know, not just one precious lamb.”

“Do not call me Lambchop,” Emma announced, realized her error as soon as she’d uttered the words. 

“Lambch—” he began.

“Can you even write a sermon? I thought you got ordained online,” Emma interrupted.

“Yeah. I think I can swing it. It’s just an essay with some quotes and a few good images and I was 2 years into a low residency MFA program before I took this job,” he said. 

“You’re a writer?”

“A playwright. But there’s no money in it, hence the Reverend Hopkins. I was tending bar already but this gig will pay for the rest of the program. At least if I eat nothing but ramen,” he said. “I was counting on more lucrative tips-- quarantine put paid to that idea.”

“We can do better than that,” Emma said, a plan taking shape in her mind the way a menagerie emerged from the clouds. 

“Better than ramen?” he whispered in her ear.

“Dream bigger, Henry.”

“Whatever you say, Lambchop.”

* * *

“Working harder’s not going to save the ship, Sam,” Char commented. She rubbed his broad shoulders. It was like massaging rebar. It was too bad the yoga studio was another victim of the quarantine. He was starting to resemble the letter C, perpetually crouched in his captain’s chair, studying various screens, documents and devices. 

“What else can I do?” he asked. He was so serious, so earnest, so adorable. He could probably help her get a refund for the trip and maybe she, they could rent one of those beach-houses-on-stilts in Fiji and have a real vacation in the future, hopefully not-too-distant. With Nutella crepes.

“Well, that’s obvious. Work smarter. Fortunately, I’m an expert at that,” she said. 

“Not terribly modest, are you?” She read in his wide smile complete approval.

“Modesty’s overrated,” Char replied. “And I’m used to be underestimated.”

“Not by me, you aren’t,” he said.


	13. QUARANTINE - DAY 4

There was something about being stuck with the Unholy Green Trinity and a hapless magician-illusionist that eroded all the goodwill gained with Excel spreadsheets, decadent side dishes and promptly returned favorite mugs. Finally receiving delivery of the much-awaited test kits in the middle of the night, ten hours after the promised 24-48h window, just added insult to injury. Having the pilot demand immediate sampling so he could be out within the hour and back on land in time for the Redskins (or “The Team Formally Known as The Redskins, what bullshit” she was bitterly told) game, made Mary downright murderous. 

She stood in the med bay, fighting the urge to stick her gloved hands anywhere close to her face and replace the large safety glasses that were slowly creeping down her nose. Jed’s inventory had been thorough, and documented with enough macros, pivots and filters to make her melt a little, but it revealed yet one more of Alexandria Line’s inherent misogynist tendencies: everything was suited for a _Grey’s Anatomy_ McSteamy-type of doctor, not a lithe former ballerina with delicate features. 

No scrubs would fit her, so she had sacrificed her yoga outfit to the task. Heading to the infirmary that brutally early morning ( _no, that's too fucking early, even for me, to count as morning,_ she inwardly groaned, stumbling in the dark on less than three hours of sleep), it had been overcast and chilly, and she had thrown on a thermal running shirt. However, she had regretfully – _stupidly,_ she corrected - omitted to remove it prior to putting on the surgical gown that was now billowing around her in a steaming yellow creampuff, the perfect evocation of Belle’s dress in the ballroom, except that the teapot, chandelier and clock were three intolerable brats, the teacup was equally annoyingly squeaky, and the Beast was a bearded doctor who was trying his best not to laugh at her oversized, overheated accoutrement. 

Their one box of medium gloves had been depleted the day prior; she had managed to squeeze her hands in the small ones, but they were cramping her fingers something fierce. There was no way a second pair would fit over for added security, so she had to make do with the large ones, the excess nitrile flapping annoying at her fingertips and palm and totally killing her manual dexterity. 

And plenty of manual dexterity was needed to rush a nasal swab sample from the whining wreck that was Alice Green. 

“You want to put that _where_?!?” she cried from her bed. “No. No fucking way." 

“Miss Green...” Mary explained as patiently as she could. “I know it’s not particularly pleasant, but it’ll just take a minute. Your brother and fiancé easily went through it.” _Easily_ was more or less accurate; both were groggy and sluggish from the high fever, barely able to keep their eyes open as she explained the various procedures, but that had not prevented them from an impressive outpour of crude comments, culminating when she had inserted the cotton swab into their nostril. The magician, thankfully, had been pleasant, until promptly passing out at the sight of the implement. 

“I don’t waannnnaaaa,” the younger woman moaned, turning her head away, before getting wracked with another coughing fit. 

“I understand, but it’s important. We just need to rule out some things.” 

“No. My wedding’s been cancelled, nothing else is important. I don’t care if this is Ebola, MEV-1 or Spattergroit, my life is ruiiiiiiiined.” 

“Well I wouldn’t be too concerned about two of those as they don’t exist, but you should definitely care about contracting the other.” 

Alice’s eyes grew wide. “Are you saying I have MEV-1? I do have that cough.... I’m going to get seizures and die like Gwyneth, aren’t I?! _AREN’T_ _I_?!.” 

Mary rose her exasperated eyes to Jed. **_Now_ ** _would be an appropriate time for your meddling ass to cut in or_ _God help her with where that swab will end up_ , she telepathically informed him through the fog of her safety glasses. The N95 mask was not the model she typically used, and the poor fit was pinching her face in five different places, _except_ over the bridge of her nose, which would have prevented every exhalation from going straight to the panes of her goggles. 

Against all odds, the message seemed to land. “Alice, nobody has MEV-1. You were such a trooper with the other samples; please let Dr. Phinney take this last one, and we’ll see what we can do to make the postponement of your wedding a little more bearable. Facetime call with your friends, maybe? And your fiancé is right here with you, isn’t that something?” 

“Noooo, I don’t care about _him_ ! He’s useless: he just sleeps or watches _Die Hard_ all the fucking time. What I want is my _wedding._ My beautiful dress. And my sparkly pretty rainbow shoes. And all the pink champagne we ordered. And my giant Twinkie wedding cake that I can’t even taste. I can’t believe I won’t ever be able to taste Twinkies again, they were soooo goooood,” she wailed. 

Jed pondered this. “Tell you what: let us take our swab and we’ll bring you your pink bubbly. A ton of it. OK?” 

Alice sniffled. “A ton of pink bubbly **_a_** ** _ **n** d _**my pretty shoes,” she pouted. 

“Champagne? Before breakfast?” Mary asked him dubiously under her breath. “Sounds a lot like malpractice to me... You should be keeping her fully hydrated to fight whatever this is, not getting her drunk.” 

“You need your swab, I need my sanity. And I said pink bubbly, not champagne. I have it on good authority that the ship’s well stocked on excellent alcohol-free sparkling apple must. And in case that wasn’t clear, that authority is _me_ : I’m kind of the expert in that domain. And a big believer in the placebo effect.” Turning back to Alice, he nodded. “You got yourself a deal, Miss Green.” 

Frowning but knowing this was as small an opening as she was likely to get, Mary ripped the swab’s sterile wrapping open and leaned down over Alice to proceed with the sampling. However, although she had tied her hair back, a shorter strand at the front escaped its prison, and with the help of the sweat beading her forehead, got stuck between her glasses and her eyes. _Goddamnit_. 

She attempted to shrug it off, trying to reach her shoulder high enough to push it away, to no avail, then shaking her head, but that just managed to free more hair. Her annoyance rising at her failure, she tried to blow air upward to dislodge it; all that did was finish to completely fog up her view. _GODDAMNIT._

So intent was she on her problem and Alice’s probably snotty but smug face before her, that she had not noticed Jed come up to her. “Uh, Dr. Phinney... do you need a hand with anything?” 

“No, I’m fine,” she snapped back, trying not to completely lose her cool nor further compromise the swab’s integrity. “I just need to be able to _actually see_ and I’ll be just fine.” 

She could feel him watching her, and surprisingly, he pointed to her forehead. “May I?” he ventured carefully. 

In that moment, with every one of her very short, underslept fuses overwhelmed by complete discomfort, her brain defaulted. She felt him reach across, gently adjust her goggles back up, and, ever so gentler, tuck back the offending strand behind her ear. His touch was a like ghost, a breeze, so very light was it against her hair and skin. Twice, he smoothed the strand over to fix it in place, although the first had probably done the trick, and the second’s sole purpose was assuredly to send shivers from her neck to her chest, making her breath catch where it crash-landed. She couldn’t see it beneath his mask, but the crinkle at his eyes betrayed his hidden smile. His eyes... those she could clearly see now, with a hesitant intensity that did nothing to disperse the heat of her excessive layers. 

**_GODDAMNIT._** _Get a grip, Phinney. This is a quarantine zone with an unknown illness, not some Victorian romance. This is not the time nor the place for that kind of stuff. Nor the right person._

Taking a step back, she shook her head, and handed him the swab. “I think it’d be best if you took the sample, Dr. Foster. This is... not working.” 

If he was disappointed, he did not let it show; with a shrug and a nod, he carefully took the swab from her, and, perhaps a touch less carefully, proceeded with the sampling, making Alice gasp and gag in the process. Once collected, the sample was inserted in its vial, and the vial in a Ziploc bag, and he passed it back to Mary. “That’s it for me,” she informed them, eager to leave. “Better get these out to the CDC.” _And that damn hair out of my face before I get it shorn off wherever Anne got her dye job._

“I’ll come with you,” Jed replied. “I’ll get about to honoring my end of the deal.” 

They made their way to the airlock delimitating the sickbay from the unquarantined portion of the ship. In an effort to contain the more severe cases, plastic walls had been drawn up to create a zone for gowning and discarding potentially contaminated protection equipment. Jed zipped open the wall and held the plastic away for her to pass through, reclosing it after they were both in the small – _Very small. Too smal_ _l_ \- enclosure. _Great. Because “claustrophobic” was another fantastic feeling I was just dying to add to my list._

“Before you say it,” Jed said, stepping next to the trash bin with the large _Biohazard_ symbol. “I have masks with integrated visors ordered already. And the 3M Aura masks and Virtua glasses you asked for. We should have them in a day or two, along with a full pallet of mediums. The blue nitrile ones. I was gonna go for purple but I didn’t want you to think that was some gendered-color sexist bullshit of me.” 

She was too annoyed with her earlier reaction to smile, whipping off her offending outer gloves. “Blue isn’t very “cleanroom”.” 

“ _Cruise ship_ isn’t very “cleanroom”,” he retorted as he removed his glasses. “And besides, the bulk of your interventions will be with the people quarantined in their cabins, so it’s not like you'll be infringing on any sancrosanct surgical etiquette.” 

She removed her own and finally cleared the hair from her forehead, all the better to glare at him. “That’s not a reason to look like dentists while doing so. Did you also get me scrubs and gowns that aren’t double-X large?” 

“Yes on the gowns, no on the scrubs. Different distributor. I got you some Tyveks instead.” 

“Tyveks?!” she cried in disbelief. “This is a quarantine zone, not a crime scene! And they’re hot as hell.” 

“I know, but at least it’s full-body protection, and your clothes will live to attend another of Aurelia’s killer ashtanga classes.” He ripped off his mask, giving his beard an apparently long-desired scratch-over. “For the scrubs, maybe Charlotte will have luck with her Red Cross contacts in Bonaire? There has to be at least one uniform supplier on the island or another nearby for the medical staff there.” 

The glare changed to a scowl. “So send the women shopping for clothes, is that it? Typical.” 

“That’s not what I said!” he exclaimed, and groaned loudly. “Listen, Mary, I’m trying my best here. This is my first quarantine and potential epidemic, and last I checked, for all your extensive training, it was yours too. So I'd appreciate you cutting me some slack already; I get enough crap being exiled in here with these three entitled idiots twelve hours a day, I think that’s penance a’plenty for my sins, as overwhelmingly many as there are.” 

It was a jolt to hear, all the more jarring to see him standing there, utterly dejected in his yellow gown and blue scrubs, the mask having left dark pink gouges across his cheekbones, right below the circles almost as dark as his sorrowful eyes. He stared at her fully, heavily, a silent plea in his weariness. “I just want us to get along,” he finally said. “I can bear all of this: the mystery illness, the night shifts, the overall insanity of the whole situation, but not fighting with you. I don't understand why I’m such a constant source of frustration and annoyance to you.” 

“You’re not-” she quickly started, but not managing to find adequate words, and even less able to explain that her irritability was more than partly due her own fantasizing of highly unprofessional gestures from him, she only hung and shook her head. “ _They_ were... and _this_ -” she gestured to her unfortunate get-up, to the airlock around them, and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m hot, I’m tired, I’m hungry. I’m not being fair. Or coherent.” 

She leaned back against the plastic-coated wall. “The CDC is not being as prompt as I expected, no matter how much I stress we require urgent attention; we only, _finally_ got these test kits at this ungodly hour, and they demanded immediate, rush sampling out, for the dumbest possible reason you could think of. Which is fine, and what I’ve been badgering them about for over three days, but... _ugh_ . And meanwhile, people on board are not taking this seriously; the damn walkie-talkies won’t shut up! Char got a call tonight to break up an _a_ _capella_ sing-off at eleven in the ballroom and a foam party at one AM in the spa. I can’t even begin to imagine the number of cross-cabin smuggling shenanigans going on, of hasty hallway hook-ups, of all these idiots not giving a fuck about their safety and that of others. And here _we_ are, like two bigger idiots, trying to play by the rules and save them from themselves. And whining about Tyveks...” At this, she sighed. “I’m so sorry, Jed. Again. I do appreciate everything you’re doing. You’re one of the few who actually gets it. And for the record, the purple gloves are my favorite.” 

“Ah, I knew it!” he exclaimed. “But you’re right, Tyveks are hot as hell, and if you show up wearing one, you’ll completely freak out Little Miss Sunshine and we’ll _never_ hear the end of it. I’ll speak with Diggs, I’m sure they have extra uniforms on board he could sacrifice to our Glorious Cause. And to Hale, for extra staff to post on guard duty; he’ll have the brig filled up with delinquents in no time.” 

For the first time that bitter proto-morning, she smiled; her eyes must have given her away, as he pressed on eagerly. “As for food and sleep, I could definitely use some of those too. Let’s get out of here.” He untied the strings keeping the gown closed and pulled the garment off, bunched it in a ball, and held his hand out to take hers. “Go on. Strip.” 

The moment the word came out, and her eyebrows shot up, he froze. “Uh, I mean... take it off. Oh hell. That’s not better, is it?” 

“Not really, no.” 

He shuffled his feet. “Uh... kindly disrobe?” 

“For fuck's sake, Jed, stop talking about removing my clothes.” _Shit, now I’ve made it worse._

He did as was told, but she had sunk the ship with them both on board: the damage was done, the mental image, most definitely set. Uninvited, her earlier scenario replayed in her mind, like an abrasive ad in the middle of a YouTube video, with no way of skipping it until the five longest seconds on Earth had passed. 

As quickly and clinically as she could, she untied and shrugged off the gown, handing it to him. Trying her best not to feel his stealthy gaze upon her, she removed her mask, her first pair of gloves afterwards; at once, the blood rushed back to her fingers, and she shook them before running them across her cheeks in a surely futile attempt in removing the unbecoming traces left behind, in dissipating a certain rising flush that was most definitely not due to the ill-fitting mask. 

“Don’t -” he said softly, almost hoarsely, and cut himself short, aware of the transgression, of the risk of breaking the odd spell that had fallen between them. 

But for Mary, it did nothing of the sort. How long had it been, since someone had looked at her this way? Not while wearing a deep cut bikini, her fit figure fully on display; nor a spectacular red dress, sparkling jewels at her ears and makeup highlighting her best features. No; in old athletic clothes, her face a sweaty, sunken, battered mess, her half-undone hair completely dishevelled. In an effort to fix the latter, she reached up and pulled off the hair-tie; the brown waves fell loose to graze her shoulders, and she shook them into place, her fingers finally tucking that cursed strand behind her ear, even going so far as repeating the second smoothing she imagined he had performed. 

She saw him swallow, open his mouth to speak again but, uncharacteristically, close it before emitting a sound. His eyes shouted loudly enough to make up for it. 

And there she had it. Had him. Should she speak the word, make the move, he’d be hers. Right here in this tiny plastic wardrobe, where he stood not two feet away from her, much too close even without any social distancing measures in place. He was there, his eyes on her face, on her lips, waiting for her cue, her permission. Should she want it, it was hers. He was hers. 

_There’s a disease onboard. We’re quarantined off a tiny island in the Caribbean. We’ll be here for weeks. We have no idea what we’re dealing with, how to cure it, how to restrain it from contaminating all of us. This is_ not _the time for sex._

_It’s always time for sex_ , replied a voice that very much sounded like Char. _Just period-appropriate sex. I’d say an airlock in a restricted, quarantined hot zone is as period-appropriate as it gets under the circumstances._

From the look Jed gave her, the way his chest heaved, that his knuckles blanched over his balled-up fists, she knew he very much agreed. 

But she wasn’t Char, who somehow always managed to dance along that very fine line between perfect professionalism and personal playtime, the two interweaving expertly, never touching. No, she was Dr. Mary Phinney, Helpless Nerd, and she had one critically important job to do, no matter how ignorantly ungrateful her patients, how limited her resources, and how terribly tempting the distractions. She’d just make an explosive mess of it all if she’d allow them to connect. 

She took a step away, closer to the exit. “Better get those to my racist redneck of a courier,” she said, nodding to the Ziploc bag. 

Jed seemed to mentally shake himself awake. “Yeah, right... And I have some shoes to collect.” 

“Sparkly, pretty, rainbow shoes. And pink bubbly. Alcohol-free.” 

“The best kind.” He smiled at her as she passed through the hand sanitizer station, and she mirrored it somewhat wistfully, encouraging him to pursue with a last-ditch effort. “I can save us a bottle, if you’d care to join me for breakfast. I make some mean toast... and I even managed to score a jar of Pitcairn honey to put on them. It’s not wild rhododendron, but it’s pretty damn amazing. You like honey?" 

_Goddamnit_. _I love honey. And pink bubbly. And most probably, definitely, more than one other little thing about you._ She turned to open the zipper, so he could not see the struggle, locate the crack in her defenses. “Best save it for when we beat this thing,” she said over her shoulder. “It’ll taste all the sweeter.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mary's PPE preferences are my own, and Tyveks are truly hot as hell. Go purple. 
> 
> Wear a mask and keep your distance, people; it's not brain surgery. And change the Washington football team's name already.


	14. Quarantine – Day 5 Maple Bourbon Snow Cones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guest chapter! @sagiow challenged me to write a chapter for the Mercy Street Cruise Ship AU that involves “floor bacon” and “leftover snow cone” and this is the result, heavy on the Emmry. Thanks for inviting me to play in your sandbox! I hope I didn’t make things too dirty!
> 
> Thanks @the-spaztic-fantastic for beta-ing and for some research on this chapter that I won’t out you for. Let’s call it medical.

The lewd bag was empty and every time Emma looked at it the same hysterical giggle worked its way up from the depths of her belly, just like the one that had made her gasp against the wall with the realization that she was quarantined in the honeymoon suite with the man she’d been crushing on for as long as she’d had this job. And then it had been Henry making her gasp, and occasionally the depths of treasure they extracted from the lewd bag. What hadn’t needed batteries – the lotions, some of the condoms, the novelty lipstick shaped like a penis – was used up or laughed over and then discarded, Emma was still too good at her job to stop taking evaluative notes on what should be added or permanently excluded from future honeymoon packages. She had berated herself for not thinking to check that the outlets matched the plugs for the plug-in, but who wanted to spend any time thinking on Alice and Frank’s sexual satisfaction. Anyway, Henry was just as good as a Hitachi. Better even, what with the stubbled jawline and forearms to admire.

They were ensconced on the bed, the silk duvet and the plush matching bathrobes the only part of the experience that felt vaguely like a sick day.

Mostly, it felt like a vacation.

Three times a day, a steward knocked on the door to deliver food. There were increasingly entertaining videos livestreamed by  _ PS I Love You _ Squivers and Henry was just as fun and funny to talk to post-sex, or more accurately in-between-sex, and no one had died.

Emma knew that should have been what she was most grateful for, and Henry was leading with it in the sermon he was live-streaming later, but it was easy to forget the chaos going on in the medical bay when she was on her honeymoon. Even a borrowed one.

A brisk knock sounded and Henry kissed her forehead as he left the bed to answer. The voice on the other side immediately scolded him and Emma tilted her head, trying to place it.

“You shouldn’t be opening the door for anyone without proper protective gear on!”

Emma wondered why someone would insist Henry answer the door with a condom on until the door opened wider and she saw the scrubs and mask Dr. Foster was wearing.

“Hello, Jed. Should I close it?” Henry seemed unbothered though he did take a few steps back, motioning for the doctor to come in. Emma thought Jed looked like he’d been awake for the five days of quarantine, and perhaps he had. It gave her a slight pang of guilt that he had been working so hard to take care of her sister and brother and soon-to-be brother-in-law/ex-boyfriend.

“Is Alice alright? And Jimmy?” She didn’t ask about Frank. Not because it was awkward, but because she didn’t really care and she’d rather keep thoughts of him out of this room where she definitely had not been thinking about him, beyond regretting that she had poured the premium bourbon Frank insisted the room was stocked with down the drain. If she had known she’d be the one holed up in this room, she wouldn’t have discarded the Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve and refilled the bottle with Jim Bean, which at the time had felt like a delightful power move. Would Frank brag about the superior taste of the good stuff instead of the cheap swill of the masses? Or would he have a Princess and the Pea moment and demand the high-end alcohol? Either would have been fireworks that amused her; it was just too bad she and Henry had to make do with the cheap stuff. It made the melted snow cones from lunch more bearable at least, and who could even taste the bourbon with the snow cone on her tongue and then Henry soon after.

“Alice and Jimmy are fine. The others too. No worse, no better. We just administered the tests and I’ve been assured we’ll get results soon. Alice sent me to collect the ‘sparkly, pretty, rainbow shoes’. The payment required for her participation in the swab.”

Emma tightened the bath robe and got out of the bed, her hands lingering on the silk, wishing it could have been longer that this room had gone without the name “Alice” being spoken. Hearing it twice was like breaking a spell.

“I don’t think her luggage is here. She was staying with her bridesmaids in an ocean view suite on A Deck.”

Jed sighed and raised a hand like he was going to rub it over his eyes and face, but then stopped, letting it fall back down. “I went there first. To Kayleigh or McEnany or MacKayleighAnnie or whatever the hell her three bridesmaids’ names are. They were next to useless and either lying or clueless, but they weren’t sick at least. Mind if I look here?”

Emma’s eyes met Henry’s and they both looked around the room at the detritus of one lewd bag and four and a half days’ worth of food and condom wrappers. Henry cleared his throat.

“How about we look and call you when we find it? And how about you take a rest in your own room before heading back to med bay? Before you need a cot there yourself?” Henry put a hand on Jed’s shoulder but Jed shook it off.

“Fine. I shouldn’t spend time in here with you anyway, stop the spread and all that. Let me know?”

He left and Henry bent to retrieve the breakfast tray that had been left and kicked at the door to shut it, but the pocket of his bathrobe got caught on the doorknob and the tray jerked out of his hands as he was pulled back with the door. Emma watched in horror as a plate slid off of the tray and the bacon slid off of the plate and onto the floor.

“Five second rule!” Henry shouted, pulling his bathrobe free of the door and scooping it up.

“On a cruise ship? During an epidemiologic disaster? I don’t think the five second rule applies.”

“Fair,” Henry said, and threw it into the trash instead. “I suppose floor bacon is not what B Gibson intended for our culinary satisfaction.”

“I’m starting to feel like this is the Battle of Manassas and we’re all on a picnic watching the horror go down with amusement. Should I be doing more to help? Jed seemed pretty exhausted.”

“Manassas, eh? Not Bull Run? Took me five days but I finally found your flaw. You’re a secret Confederate.”

Emma swatted at him, but then reconsidered and swiped a pancake from the tray he was still holding instead. “I’m from Virginia. It’s what the battlefield sign says.”

Henry put the tray on the bed, resettling the plates and arranging the fruit and sausage that remained and took a pancake for himself. He spoke in between bites and he was so comforting and certain, Emma thought that online ordination must have included some contact hours for counseling training. He was so good at it. “I think quarantining is the most helpful thing we can do right now. That and look for these shoes. We know we’ve been exposed to Alice and if we go out, we just make the problem worse.”

Despite the sentence ending with “make the problem worse,” Emma felt a thrill of victory. For right now, for this perfectly weird moment, the best thing she could do for her job, for her family, for the good of the public health, was to remain in a honeymoon suite with Henry. It was a sacrifice she could handle.

They finished their breakfast and then began searching for the ridiculous shoes Alice apparently needed while prone in a hospital cot. Henry turned the livestream on and they watched with amusement as Percival Squivers apologized for the unhinged magic shows he had been giving over the past few days and then pledged to provide truly riveting content for the remainder of quarantine, however long it lasted. Then he reached to turn off his camera but missed, and Henry and Emma abandoned their search as they watched, open-mouthed and eyes wide as Squivers pulled a half dollar from behind a woman’s ear as she leaned in to kiss him. Squivers kept attempting to say, or guess, her name, like it was a magic trick that would have the best reveal yet: Lisette? Linnette? Laurent? And then what followed wasn't exactly porn, it wasn't exactly not porn, but it definitely wasn't good porn and they turned from it to keep searching.

As she lifted pillows and emptied drawers and looked in the smallest closet to ever bear the name, Emma considered how much easier it was going to be to stop this wedding now that the bride and groom were both sick. But she wanted it to not happen ever, and the means to prevent it was still not in her grasp.

Henry hadn't asked why and she wanted to think it was because he could tell how awful they were or that he'd do whatever she asked or that he was ready for hijinks of any kind, and not that he expected an explanation. Because she wasn’t sure she could explain the mortification of her former boyfriend marrying her little sister. It was cute when Amy March did it, but if Emma had to choose a scene to repeat from that book it would be letting her sister fall through the ice, and not necessarily the rescue that followed.

“Bingo!” Henry called, holding a shoe box aloft that had been stashed behind a pile of towels they hadn’t worked their way through yet.

Emma crossed the room to sit next to him as he opened the lid. The shoes were very sparkly, every color of the rainbow shimmering and shining in the sequins as they caught the light. Emma lifted them out and frowned as she saw something left behind, half-hidden by the tissue paper surrounding the shoes.

“That’s Frank’s phone,” she said, reaching for it and flipping it over so the rebel flag phone case was at least not offensively visible. She put in the code she knew he’d use: 1-2-3-4 and a series of pictures was already queued up.

She swiped through selfies of Frank, Jimmy posing obscenely, all the groomsmen posing obscenely, a close up of Alice’s ass, Frank boarding a plane, and then a series of photos with a random seatmate who looked to be the reigning Miss Italy. Photos in the cramped bathroom that left Emma with no doubt that plenty of germs and viruses and perhaps even an entire plague could have been caught from the amount of skin and orifices and fluids being exchanged in the bathroom, fully documented on his phone, in black and white, in video, in various filters that Emma appraised with a critical eye and announced, to Henry's amusement "Yep. Just as bad as I remember.”

He flashed her a smile. The one that meant this round was over and it had been a good one. “You did it. You found the evidence. No wedding.”

Emma shook her head. “If it was in her shoes, she knows. Nothing matters. The truth is out there and no one cares.”

A new sound was coming from the livestream and Henry and Emma turned to look, able to see clearly as Silas the pig and Mrs. Brannon came into frame and demanded of Squivers “Did you find it for me? I’m tired of paying you and seeing nothing but lousy magic to show for it.”

“I think we figured out Squivers’s side hustle,” said Henry, but he turned the tablet off at Emma’s blank look. “The truth does matter. And I made a no-vow vow. I don’t break my vows.”

“No wedding,” Emma said, equally solemn.

“The truth matters,” he repeated, and Emma wondered if he meant the revelers still having pop-up parties in hallways and acting like quarantine was a suggestive role play you could opt out of if it didn't suit your entertainment interests. It would be a good sermon, if anyone could tear themselves away from the trainwreck of the Squivers show to watch.

***

Jed came to retrieve the shoes later, looking marginally better rested but wielding test kits and insisting he administer them so the mad rush of the second round could at least be staggered. Emma giggled hysterically as Henry yelled “Peacock! Peacock!” and then again as the swab went so far up her nose she thought it was tickling her hairline from beneath her skull. 

“Let’s add some more bourbon to the leftover snow cones,” she said as Jed left, bags and shoes in hand. The phone they had kept; the plan was still formulating on how to wield it.

“I want it that way,” Henry sang, sounding sexier than a Backstreet Boy though somewhat more nasally as he rubbed at the bridge of his nose and grinned at her.


	15. QUARANTINE - DAY 6(?)

Getting their sexcation surprisingly interrupted by Jed Foster had self-consciously spurred Emma and Henry to pick up the mess left about by their thorough discovery and enjoyment of each other, with much unneeded yet appreciated encouragement provided by the Lewd Bag, which now sat, alarmingly almost empty, on the end table. This - and other progressive, physical discomforts, at least one of them surely allergic in nature and of which alledged culprit Emma had taken angry, double-underscored note of- had given them further incentive to consider other activities. The bedsheets were stripped and changed, the blinds were pulled, the balcony door opened for the warm sea breeze to draft in. The hunt for Emma’s glasses took the better part of half an hour, finally being found under the bunched up dark blue dress she had worn when she had last been free of this room -although a quite different and liberating definition of freedom had since been found inside- and that they had not even managed to take off until their second time. And for the first time in God knows how many days, Henry pulled on a shirt. 

Not a cozy terry robe, nor his crumpled Nirvana t-shirt. No, an actual, crisp, cotton, buttoned-up shirt, in a psychedelic amalgam of colors he would never have picked himself in a store. But he was not in a store: he was in the honeymoon suite of a cruise ship, raiding his current - dare he say it?- girlfriend’s -oh my God he had!- former boyfriend’s -ugh, eew- wardrobe. He had cursed Stringfellow’s love of tight fits and picked the largest one, and yet, the sleeves had only fallen above his wrists; he had had no choice but to roll them up, and keep the top button open to keep himself from self-strangulation, which posed something of an overall challenge along with the shallow breathing required to ensure all the others did not pop open. 

His imminent suffocation aside, in the aesthetic department, Emma had not complained. 

Or rather, she had, regarding the length of all of Alice’s dresses. Even what probably constituted a maxi, formal number barely reached mid-thigh on her taller frame. 

Of this, Henry had not complained either. 

“It’s a good thing we’re stopping this wedding,” he nodded, watching her pull at her hem and failing to stretch it out. “Can you imagine how short your nephews would be?”

“Short and angry and grating and surely unbearable. But no. No imagining nephews. I hope that whatever this is, it makes them both thoroughly and irrevocably sterile.”

“Oh, that’s not very Christian of you,” he jokingly scolded.

With a look he had come to recognize as meaning nothing good - and by “nothing good”, he meant “wicked awesome”-, she took the three steps it took to cross the room and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Oh, because spending days on end fucking my brains out was perfectly Biblical?” she replied, looking up sweetly.

He shrugged, his hands on her backside, his fingers reaching down to skim the skin her skirt was not covering, and making her squirm away in his embrace. “I’d argue it was very Book of Solomon.”

“I doubt Solomon was hooking up with randoms in a stolen cruise ship suite,” she scoffed.

“Solomon was hooking up left and right in his dubiously inherited palace with his 700 wives and 300 concubines, so I think it’s not too far off. And besides, what is that random nonsense?” he added with a frown, his hands abandoning their quest to pull her even closer. “I’ve known you for years, Emma Green. I’ve loved you for years minus one day. There is nothing random in this. In us.”

This drew a smile from her, and earned him a kiss; it was prevented from leading to more by a knock at the door. “Oh, that must be dinner!” she exclaimed. “Shall we eat it on the balcony? A sunset _tête-à-tête_?”

He nodded, stepping out to set the table. “Eating while sitting and using utensils, wearing actual clothes. Like an actual date!... which reminds me, we’ve never even been on one.” 

“That might be a good thing,” she said, carrying one heavily-laden tray to the small round table outside. “I’m terrible on dates. I’m awkward, and self-conscious, and can’t do small talk for the life of me. They rarely lead to second ones.”

“Which is all to those idiots’ loss, since you’re the exact opposite in bed,” he smiled appreciatively, and she swatted at him as she passed him on her way to the front door to fetch the second meal.

“Focus, Hopkins. Get us some wine and glasses instead, will you?”

“Sure thing. Red or white? What’s on the menu?”

She set the tray down and lifted the lid; once the wafting steam had subsided, and she had then cleared its condensation from her glasses in annoyance, Henry saw her eyebrows raise in surprise above the rims.

“Wow. It’s a full turkey dinner. Holiday style.”

“What?!” he cried, a bottle of wine in each hand. “How long have we been on this damn ship?”

She shook her head, the math visibly not adding up. “I… I honestly don’t know anymore.”

“Huh…maybe we should have some of that sparkling alcohol-free pink stuff Foster left us instead.”

“That’s probably wise,” Emma agreed, as she continued to unwrap the various dishes, “and it should pair well enough with the sweet potato casserole and the mac n’ cheese.”

“The _what?!_ ” The pop of a cork followed as the point on a very surprised exclamation point.

“Sweet potato casserole? It’s a Southern thing. With marshmallows. Not exactly my favorite, but I can’t wait to see how B Gibson spun it.”

“Ugh,” he groaned as he came out to the balcony, the pink apple must and two champagne flutes balanced expertly in his hands. “No, that I’d heard of before. What was the other one?”

“Mac n’ cheese?! You’ve never heard of mac n’ cheese?!”

“Of course I have. But what the hell is it doing in a Holiday turkey dinner?!”

His outraged tone made her cross her arms. “It’s being its delicious self.”

“But why?!” he said, scanning the table for a spot to place the bottle, and to take in all the side dishes. “Is there no mashed potatoes? No stuffing?”

“No, we have those too, if you’re willing to call the latter “dressing” instead. And rolls as well.”

“But whyyyyy?!” he cried out again. “Why add macaroni to all that?”

“Because it’s good! What do you typically have, Snowcone? Bagels and pastrami?”

“Haha, that’s from the City, not Upstate. No, what I said earlier, and gravy, and cranberry sauce, of course. Some veggies, like green beans, or side salad.”

It was Emma’s turn to cringe. “Salad?! But whyyyyy? It’s a holiday feast!”

“You need some balance. Not just a humongous mountain of carbs.”

“Why the hell not? IT’S A HOLIDAY FEAST!” she exclaimed, gesturing at the spread before them. “What’s next, fucking _fruit_ for desert?”

“Well, yeah, but in pie. Apple, pumpkin. Pecan too, to appease your Southern sensibilities.” His eyes narrowed, a daring light in them. “Unless you rebels stick marshmallows in those too?”

“Well better in pies than on a stick _and up our asses,_ isn’t it?”

He glared at her as she glowered at him, the blue of her eyes a stormy ocean, the pink of her flushed cheeks matching the must in his glass, and he hung his head. “I don’t think this is gonna work out.”

Emma blanched. “Wha- what are you talking about?”

“This. All of this.” He took a deep draught of sparkling juice, the surprisingly intense carbonation almost drawing tears from his eyes, and shook his head. “I can’t invite my parents home and serve them a Holiday meal that will include mac n’ cheese. I just… can’t.”

Immediately, Henry felt the temperature drop, as if the wind had turned over the sea to blast directly and uniquely onto their balcony, with Emma standing as tall and immobile as a lighthouse on the shore. With one step, he crossed over to her, and took her hands in his. “Emma - babe, it’s a joke. I’m kidding. I’m sorry, it was dumb, it wasn’t funny. I would never -”

“No, no, I know…” she cut him off, shaking her head. “It’s not - It’s just … “ She eyed him hesitantly. “... the “meeting parents” part? And inviting them… to our home?”

It was his turn to freeze. “Damnit… I’m such an idiot. Too fast, right? I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to freak you out. It was just a stupid joke.”

“No! It wasn’t stupid - well, it kinda was, but not for that.” She wavered. “I didn’t think that you- that it’s what you saw - see… for us. After this.”

“Is that bad?” he dared to ask.

“No.” There was the faintest smile over her lips. “It’s a bit scary, and intimidating, and weird to think of the world outside of these ten square feet, but it’s also… pretty exciting.”

With a barely contained sigh of relief and a small tug to her hands, he made her sit on one of the plastic deck chairs, and pulled the other next to hers. “Listen, I might be a mail-order chaplain, but as you probably can tell from this, I’m kinda old-fashioned. I don’t do stuff like we’ve been doing… and doing… and _doing_ , if there’s no deeper connection. If I’m not in it for the long run. And with you, I’m really hoping it’s a Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race.” 

She squeezed his hand, giving him the courage to conclude. “I would’ve liked for us to take a more traditional approach in our relationship, take you on romantic dates, not make a move until the third, but I guess an unfolding pandemic and the risk of imminent death makes you realign your priorities.”

It was no longer just the hint of a smile. “I think, if it hadn’t been for an unfolding pandemic and the risk of imminent death, that we would never have taken any approach at all. To our relationship.”

He exhaled, something of a groaned chuckle as he relished the way she sounded that wonderful word. “Ugh, so true… Could you imagine? What dorks we were.”

“I’d argue we still are, if our first fight was over mac n’ cheese.”

“Fight? Nah. Argument. Debate. Point - counterpoint.”

“Hmmm,” she nodded, pulling her chair closer to the table, his hand still held tightly against her lap. “So how about we settle whatever it was by enjoying this highly contentious meal before it cools and congeals, and then you can apologize for the error of your Yankee ways.”

He followed suit, topping off their flutes with the fizzy drink, and lifting his. “I will most gladly do so if it turns out not to be an utter abomination. Which I highly doubt.”

She clicked her glass to his, the challenge accepted, and they merrily dug in. “Better leave some room for dessert too!” she said, savoring her first bite of creamy sharp cheddar.

“Did we establish what it was, before we went to war over pasta? I’m really hoping pumpkin.”

She opened the last small carton, and frowned. “Huh. Well that’s disappointing. Oatmeal cookies.”

“Ooooooh my favorite! With raisins, I hope?”

Her face contorted in utter disgust. “There you go putting fucking fruit in dessert again… Raisins are the absolute worst; they look like delicious chocolate chips, but they most definitely are not. It’s a cruel prank, every single time.”

He gasped. “Have some respect! They are nature’s candies!”

“What the hell does that even mean? That’s some Grade A granola bullshit. Are you a hippie, Hopkins? A chocolate-faking, dessert-depressing hippie? Because if you are, well… I just don’t think this is gonna work out.”

For the twinkling light in her sunlit sky eyes, the way she bit her bottom lip as she awaited his reply, he would gladly forsake all fruit forevermore. And it would all still be wicked awesome. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been languishing in my WIPs for close to 2 months, might as well post now before it's completely out of season. 
> 
> Thank you to Fericita for the culinary, regionally-divergent inspirations to this piece; you still haven't convinced me it's not an utter abomination, but your appreciation of Costco's 5lb bags of chocolate chips tells me you're a person of fine taste so I haven't fully dismissed it ;)
> 
> I know wicked awesome is Textbook Boston, but I've been assured it's also very much an Upstate NY thing.


	16. Quarantine: Day 9

“So, what about if the next time I show up, Henry answers the door in a—”

“Seriously, Jed, I can’t take another hypothetical question that’s basically porn. Not good porn, no offense to Henry and kudos to you for making me rethink my snap judgment on your heteronormativity—I’m just, I’m just done. I’ve had it up to here,” Mary said, waving her ungloved hand well above her uncovered head in what passed for near-nudity between them. “I didn’t even want to go on a cruise, I got talked into it and now look!”

“I can see how this isn’t a ringing endorsement for the entire cruise ship industry,” Jed said. “Though we’d probably be spending our time in much the same way if we were home, just minus the cheesecake slices from B Gibson. And there’d probably be more documentation to do on a shitty EMR.”

“I’m just so tired of this,” Mary said. “It fucking sucks and that’s my professional opinion.”

Jed laughed, wondering again how he’d gotten so lucky. Mary, exasperated, frustrated, exhausted, was still the best doctor he’d ever worked with, so sharp and brilliant he frequently forgot how beautiful she was and that was saying something, even given the failings of PPE when it came to playing up a woman’s assets. He imagined, briefly because that was all he could take, what it would have been like to handle the outbreak without her, Jed vs. the nameless contagion and the Greens and whatever nefarious dealings they’d been getting into. They’d all have been sunk, figuratively and possibly literally, because Sam would probably have gotten sick trying to take care of everything and the ship would have hit a reef or a shoal or been bitten in half by some prehistoric shark they’d dredged up from the deep and Mary was still sitting there, her shoulders slumped so dramatically it was evident in the baggy scrubs. It was a situation that called for something truly intoxicating—the truth.

“It does suck,” he said. She gave him her reasonably surprised look and he wished it was because he’d gotten reservations at an Ethiopian place she’d been wanting to go to or JAMA had accepted his revised paper once he’d caved and taken all Mary’s edits. “What? I’m not going to try and do some Pollyanna cheer-up routine and I think we’ve discovered the limits of how a Coke with a glass half-full of crushed ice or linguine alle vongole can lift your spirits. Though you really can put away an alarming amount of pasta.”

“Thanks, I guess. You have kind of a weird bedside manner, Jed,” she said.

“I’m a surgeon on a cruise ship, you do the math,” he replied. “No, wait, don’t. You probably can and will and it won’t make you or me feel any better. I know what you need—”

“You do, do you?” she said quickly, fast enough he wondered again who the jackass was who’d made her ready to go on defense at the drop of a hat or a glove or a syringe. They were both working on minimal sleep and it made him a little clumsy. He’d given up on contacts yesterday even though Mary called him Clark for a solid two hours when she saw his glasses.

“You need a good night’s sleep and a hot bath. Alone. Some period drama miniseries with good production values and a decent male lead. A day on the beach, a nearly empty one where you can walk for three miles and the water’s clear, you can swim if you want to. No undertow,” he said, warming to it because he could picture her in each scenario and she was always smiling. If he was honest, she was smiling at him because he was in each scenario like a fucking Mary Sue and why not?

“I need a vaccine and a treatment protocol. I need a hospital ship to come and pick everyone up and leave us in peace,” she countered.

“That’s all?” he asked, taken aback that she’d said us and that she sounded serious.

“Fine. I want a yacht, a small one, one that two people can crew. I want enough Coke and pasta and 80% dark chocolate truffles for two weeks and a deserted island we get to when we’ve had enough time out on the water. I want a beach cottage with 400 count Egyptian cotton sheets and coconut oil and NK Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy to read when you take a nap,” she said.

“I’m taking a nap? I can’t manage to stay awake in your fantasy?” he said. He bit his tongue, because he sounded like the jackass now and also, was this even real? 

“You wore yourself out,” she said, in the most provocative tone he’d ever heard her use. It was replaced with a startling tenderness when she added, “And I like to watch you sleep.”

She’d woken him yesterday at seven am, his neck screaming because he’d fallen asleep at the cobbled-together work-station he used for his desk instead of making it to the cot that was literally two feet away. He didn’t love the feeling of the nitrile gloves at the nape of his neck but her hands were so gentle, almost as gentle as her dark eyes regarding him.

“We only have to hang in a little longer, Mary,” he said. “All the results of that last study were so positive and they’re all holding their own, even Jimmy looks less like a person made solely from day-old porridge. The PPE production’s ramped up. Almost everyone’s wearing their masks properly now. And I think I might be able to sweet-talk Bridget into borrowing a yacht when it’s all over. I did save Silas when he was choking on that turnip-arugula amuse-bouche and his KN94—rescuing that pig’s the best way to get in her good books and stay there, you know that.”

“Jed—”

“I mean it. And I promise, the next time if Henry comes to the door in nothing but a thong made of sailor’s knots and a set of false eyelashes, I won’t tell you about it—”

“Actually, you have to tell me if that happens,” Mary said.

“Really? That you want to know?” Jed asked. “Is it the eyelashes, because I think they’d be overkill on him, or the knots and the thong? I mean, it just sounds like so much chafing—"

“I’d want to know if he’s blushing,” Mary said. “And what Emma calls out when he opens the door.”

“Yeah, they seem to be making out like bandits,” Jed said, filing away Mary’s requests and the delicious color her cheeks turned while she spoke.

“They’re more than making out,” Mary quipped. “I believe you called it a sexcation?”

“No, that was Emma. I said sexcapade and did they really need all the extra paraphernalia not that I was trying to kink-shame them but come on already and then she threw a heart-shaped pillow at me,” Jed answered. “For the record, I ducked but it was a near-miss. She’s got quite an arm on her.”

“For once, I can’t say you deserved it.” Mary smiled and she still looked tired, but not quite as much. It took everything he had not to close the distance between them and take her in his arms and he couldn’t help a moment of bitterness thinking about Henry and Emma who had no such compunctions or complications.

“You think, after all of this, we get what we deserve in life?” Jed asked, trying to channel his frustration into sounding philosophical. Or wry, he could usually manage a fucking decent “wry” even in the least conducive situations. Mary gave him a look that said this wasn’t one of those times.

“I think the people closest to us try to make sure we do,” she said. “Our just desserts, that is. Whether it’s a Coke or that Key Lime cheesecake or a PPE-covered shoulder to metaphorically cry on.”

“That’s not all you deserve, Mary,” Jed said softly.

“I know,” she said. “But it’s all that’s on offer just now.”

“But later—” he began, willing her to remember the imaginary yacht with its full-bellied sails and glossy hull, the endless sweep of white sand dividing the blue sea and the bluer sky, his bare hands reaching out for her bare shoulders, the scent of coconut oil between them when he swept aside her loose hair to kiss the spot just below her ear.

“Later will have to take care of itself,” she interrupted. “You said, just a little longer, right? Were you telling the truth?”

“God, I hope so,” he said. Later wouldn’t take care of itself—that was his job and for the first time in a while, he was eager to impress the boss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while and this scene doesn't add much plot-wise, but I think it captures some of the zeitgeist in terms of real life. And it allowed me to search cheesecake recipes and plug NK Jemisin, who is a truly amazing writer.


	17. QUARANTINE - DAY X

"No, I can't do that," Sam said. “No, I - good bye, Mrs. Green.”

With a huff, he ended the call and dropped the phone uncharacteristically briskly next to his interrupted snack. “I really wish she would finally listen instead of acting like enough requests would change the course of the boat and the illness. She calls me five times a day, and her husband, twice that, although it’s mostly just to scream “Sail the damn ship, Diggs!”. I’m exhausted.”

From her seat in the captain’s chair, her flip-flopped feet crossed on top of the console, Charlotte licked the last of the powdered sugar from her thumb, before bringing the volume of the radio back to its pre-call level, the familiar rhythm of calypso filling the darkened bridge once more, and she tilted her head at him.

“No wonder; you’ve barely left the command center since we’ve been anchored.”

He groaned, rubbing his brow as if to erase the last tortuous minutes from memory. “Yes, because I fear that the moment I will, Green will sneak in, sail us away, and probably wreck us on the first rock he passes. It’ll be even harder to keep people quarantined on a sinking ship.”

“Surely they are trustworthy people that could hold the fort tonight? Give you a break?”

“Honestly?” His hands on his hips, he pondered this for an instant, giving her plenty of opportunity to admire the way his perfectly tailored uniform stretched across his broad chest, his bulging traps and deltoids threatening to pop the three barred epaulet right from his shirt. “Aside from Byron - and even with him, I have my doubts- I can’t think of a single one that wouldn’t be easily bribed or scared into submission by that man. Or even more eager to sail away. We’re close to having a mutiny on our hands.”

“If we don’t get an insurrection first,” she sighed. “The passengers are getting more than restless, although I can’t really blame them. The interior cabins are little more than tiny dark closet. Imagine being stuck in there with someone you can barely tolerate, like your spouse of 20 years.”

“That’s… cynical,” he frowned, missing the smirk that had followed her delivery as he dug back into the box of beignets. “But also the reason why I refuse for the younger Greens to be released from the med bay, even if they’re doing better. These idiots will lead a riot the second they’re out to reclaim the pools and bars.”

Based on Mary’s many pained, teeth-clenched, expletive-laden accounts of her time spent with these patients, Charlotte could only nod. “At least the magician has been following the rules since he returned to his room.”

“Some good news. Please tell me Dr. Phinney has more from the CDC. Weren’t those tests supposed to be run within 2-3 days?” he asked, a spark of hope on his tired face.

It was a damn shame to dash it so quickly, but in Charlotte’s view, Bandaids were better ripped right off, especially from such a tight body, his taut muscles in subtle, succulent display as he paced - prowled? oh yeah, prowled - about the room with his pastry, his white uniform immune to their damage. “Well… Mary’s starting to think they might be filtering her very numerous and insistent calls, same as you should start doing with the Greens. She’s also starting to realize the CDC might not be the Eminent and Righteous Scientific medical authority she thought of, and that they might actually not have this thing under control at all. Apparently, some misfires about a malarial drug? And bleach injection recommendations?” 

The half-eaten beignet stalled in midair, hovering in limbo before his mouth, before dropping dejectedly; doing so, it revealed a trail of dust across his full bottom lip that she really wanted - no, had- to do something, anything about, and it wasn’t until he had wiped it off that she could finally escape that delicious tangent and return to her previous train of thoughts. “Anyway, it’s been pretty sad, watching her watch her dream crash and burn. Kinda like meeting your teenage hero and realizing they’re a major MAGA jackass who retweets Deep State Pizzagate shit all day long.”

“Wow… should we have gone to the WHO instead?” 

Oops. There might’ve been duct tape under that Bandaid. “Well, also apparently, the US has withdrawn from WHO. So, huh, no.”

“What?! What else happened while we were here?” He reached the bay window and froze, his gaze suddenly unfocussed as he stared across the starlit sea, taking forever to chew and swallow the last bite of his beignet. “And how long have we been here, exactly? My charts all say March 34th, for some obscure reason.”

“Hard to tell; the WI-FI’s all but dead, and when it does work, we’re only getting access to the Cuban-approved websites. Even my Spanish is good enough to see they’re having an absolute field trip with all the apparent failures of the current administration.”

There was the slightest narrowing in his glassy eyes. “.... But we’re nowhere near Cuba.”

“Oh, my sweet summer Samuel…” She swung her legs down to sashay over to him as he stood as lost and dismayed as a Gen Zer at a Seinfeld convention. “Nothing makes sense anymore. The world’s gone to hell, and we’re on a floating raft just outside of it. I expect that’s what we get for setting off on a cruise in the Bermuda Triangle on the Friday the Thirteenth before the Ides of March.”

“...But we’re nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Figure of speech,” she shrugged. “State of mind. The whole planet, this whole year is a geomagnetic aberration, a death trap in which we all collectively sink to never resurface. In other words, we’re fucked.”

“I thought you said you came here to cheer me up,” he said, now completely thrown, and she wished the powdered sugar still remained on his lips, and that there wasn’t a pandemic that could make it a most life-threatening mistake for her to wipe it off with her own. Not that she wouldn’t, right now, and do much more after that, but she still had a feeling Captain Proper might not be as eager.

But she also knew he was not completely indifferent, by the way he beamed at her arrival on her daily visits, bearing smuggled goods, to the casual, comfortable company they had soon established as they shared the news better kept off the walkie-talkie’s frequencies. To the side glances he shot her when he thought she wasn’t looking, the way he rubbed at the nape of his neck when she most definitely was.

There was something there, but how much of it, and how much for the immediate taking, she still had to figure out.

Charlotte smiled brightly, a beacon to draw him back to harbour, and then to shore. “I did, and not just with B Gibson’s kickass Mardi Gras treats. Unlike you, I am not a prisoner of this room. So I can go about and gather anything your kind, secluded heart desires. So, what will it be? Sazerac, or another drink? Entertainment? Comfort?” 

His mind brought back to the present, to the tangible, Samuel mulled it over. “Comfort… I’d kill for my own bed, rather than the stiff, narrow, half-a-foot too short fold-out camp one we have in here.”

“Hmm. Tall order, even for me. But can I offer your own pillow and extra premium blankets? We could build a fort. Or you could pile ‘em up, Princess and the Pea style.”

He chuckled, dusting the remains of white powder from his fingers. “A bullshit fairy tale if there ever was one.”

“Seriously!” she exclaimed. “What is even the moral of it? What have we learned, kids? That we should all strive to have as hypersensitive asses as the princess?”

“Maybe it’s that you learn the true worth of a person by sticking a pea where it’s most likely to annoy them.”

“Huh. That’s actually semi-rational. And where might that be for you, Samuel Diggs?” she asked, the edges of her words suddenly softer.

“Apparently, between the last two functionning brain cells of James Green.” 

At Charlotte’s half-gasped laugh, he smirked and shrugged, leaning his shoulder against the window. “I mean, I was perfectly content being a First Mate, working on building my hours at sea to qualify for Captain one day. Sailing ships, making sure everything ran smooth. Collecting aged rums from every island we stopped at. On the clear nights, taking the scenic route back to my cabin at night, looping around the less popular decks to watch the stars. On some others, getting out of uniform and sneaking into some dancing. It wasn’t much, but… it’d be so much, now.”

Charlotte watched him, trying to picture him as he might have been, back in these careless days when his amazing shoulders did not have to bear the weight of their safety, and finding it too irresistible to leave it solely in her imagination. “Well, I can’t do much about your bed, but what you just described, those are all things I can bring you here.” 

At his frown, she pointed to the large windows surrounding them. “If we stand there, turn off the lights, we have the stars. If I raid the cellar, I can get us all the reserva rum we care to taste. And the WI-FI might be shot, but the ship’s radio isn’t, and I very well know by now that it is very well stocked in Latin rhythms. And as for getting you out of uniform…” She let the sentence float, for him to fill out the blank, her eyes strongly suggesting the preferred answer.

He stood, silent, the music all the clearer, the grating of the guïra along the accordion inducing the subtlest of movement. Finally, he smiled. “Sounds wonderful, but I shouldn’t. I’m on duty.”

“Nobody’s on duty 24/7; you’re just holding the fort, blanket or not. You can do that with a fine drink in your hand, a sweet beat in your ears- and me in your arms.”

She saw his eyes drift down from her face, briefly, before being brusquely summoned back with a blink, his expression open yet unreadable. “It’s kinda hard to dance six feet apart.”

“Oh, come on. You’ve been sequestered here for who the fuck knows how long anymore and have maybe seen five people in total. And as for me, I’m masked, gloved, and drenched in hand sanitizer two dozen times a day. My hands are completely burned off from all the washing with cheap, abrasive soap. They could use a little tender touch.” She reached for his hand, and he did not pull it away. “Don’t you think we both do?”

With a deliberate, slow shuffle, she closed the distance between them, and slid her other hand up his bare arm, coming to rest at the edge of his short, pristine sleeve. He hesitated, before speaking softly. “I think it feels kinda wrong for us to do what we’re trying so very hard to prevent the passengers from doing as well.”

“This shady cruise line does not deserve you, Captain Diggs.” Her eyes insistently sought his, and when they finally found them, and held them captive, brightened with a cunning light. “But we’re not preventing anything for those already behind closed doors… as we are. What else do you think they could possibly be doing now, all alone in their tiny dark closets, with their spouse of 20 years?”

“Oh, same as us, I expect: beignets and blanket forts.”

As her laughter resonated through the room and the steady beats of merengue gave way to the swells of rhumba, she felt the lightest touch, the softest pressure at her hip. “But you’re right, Char. What else is there to do, when the world has gone to hell, and we’re afloat on a raft, with only music for company? What’s one dance before we sink?”

She squeezed his hand. “Not much, but… so much, now.” 

He stepped forward, and she followed the slow, subdued sway of his lead. She matched his emboldening steps, their bodies coming into the briefest of contact, before moving apart, and back together again, his grasp on her tightening, his confidence in her ability to follow him rising, her eagerness to rise above it, even higher.

He moved even better than she had seen him do, in the image of her mind; and if this was any indication of how he’d move, in that other type of dance she had repeatedly, vividly, ecstatically imagined them performing, it all bode very well indeed.

But for tonight, until the phone rang once more, or the walkie talkies crinkled from the nethers with yet one more ridiculous emergency at sea, it was enough to have this, and only the stars and the blinking lights of the navigational equipment as witnesses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the throwback to March 2020, but... chronology?
> 
> Fericita prompted me this on tumblr as a first sentence challenge :"No, I can't do that," Sam said, wishing that this time she would finally listen instead of acting like enough requests would change the course of the boat and the illness."

**Author's Note:**

> Could we have chosen "A Tall Ship and a Star to Sail Her By" as our title? Of course. But we went with this title instead, not one from Emily Dickinson or any other poet, to set the stage for what will be a tight ship indeed-- Sagiow and I were both enamored of the discarded round robin theme of Cruise Ship/Quarantine AU, so we decided to run with it. I fully admit that I have never been on a cruise but I don't mean to let that stop me from writing about it!
> 
> EDITED: Chapter headings now titled by mixologist extraordinaire, Sagiow!


End file.
